Marguerite Duras: a pleasure for initiates

• Filmmakers The Intimacy of Chantal Ackerman

«These panthers are not happy...».

There is genuine horror in the voice of

as if she recognized herself in the caged felines.

She is at the Vincennes Zoo (Paris) interviewing the animal caretaker ("Do they never come out? It's terrible") and she nervously smokes her cigarette, which always seems the same, about to go out.

"I had a little monkey, when I lived in Indochina," she recalls uncomfortably.

His left hand holds what could be the same cigarette, very close to his face, this time relaxed and with a slow voice: "Is striptease a real job?" he asks the stripper

.

When he sits down with actress

it seems that the writer is in front of one of her characters.

Not only because Mercouri had played one of them in the film 10:30 PM Summer, based on her Spanish novel (she set it in Andalusia and Madrid), but because the actress herself seems to have come out of a Duras book.

Mercouri smokes as much or more than her.

"I like hotels, impersonal things," she says, very elegant, dressed in black and with a simple gold pendant.

Despite being a fashionable actress, in 1967 Mercouri does not have a house, she does not want to have one (“I am afraid to be alone in a house”).

She doesn't have Greek nationality either: the dictatorship took it away from her (although in a democracy she would return and she would be one of the best Ministers of Culture in the country).

That intimate Duras, at close range and between puffs, is the one on Sunday nights on

, a cult and avant-garde magazine that aired on French television between 1965 and 1973. The television Duras is one of the most unknown and it can be seen in the retrospective dedicated to him by the Virreina de Barcelona until October 2.

It is the first anthology of the writer in Spain and goes far beyond her literature to show her cinema (not only the one filmed by the others, but the one she herself directed), her theater, television her.

"Duras maintains her status as a cult author, although at the same time and above all in France, she remains a popular icon," asserts

director of the Virreina and curator of a cult exhibition.

Because here is all of Duras, told from his 56 books (between novels, compilations and plays) and 19 films, in addition to a dozen scripts.

"Explain Duras to me, I don't understand anything," is the already legendary phrase that

released to her common editor at Gallimard.

Entering Duras is not easy, but those who enter do not want to leave.

Although there is a chronological and thematic order in the exhibition, it hardly matters: its spaces and/or chapters are like Durasian comings and goings, they can be read like

(1987), a fascinating book without beginning or end, of «floating writing », according to Duras herself, who orally dictated to Jérôme Beaujour almost as an epitaph.

In it he reviews his characters and his novels, his obsessions, his heartbreaks, his summers at the Roches Noires de Trouville hotel (on the Normandy coast), his alcoholism problems (these are the harshest passages) and even his list of purchase (in which Nescafé is not lacking).

The echoes of

also resonate in his cinema, in those long sequences of ethereal landscapes (in the manner of his floating writing), in the existential tribulations of his female protagonists, in the narrative resource of the voice-over (a often his)...

One of the curiosities of the exhibition is the harsh letter of rupture (professional) that Duras sent in 1969 to

when the filmmaker rejected his script.

Resnais had already directed

(1959), but he did not like the script for Capital Destruction.

So Duras herself decided to direct the film under the title

(Destroy, she says), which is screened in the Virreina movie theater, along with other films such as

or

«His characters appear and reappear in different films, in plays or in novels.

We could say that the entire Durasian production is an entry, an exit and a re-entry into a certain melting pot of small stories, voices and spaces revisited indistinctly and from diverse expressive means”, Roma points out.

In Marguerite Duras, the work is always related to life, beginning with her childhood and adolescence, which she explains in

(1984), but also in the criticism of France's "colonial vampirism" in Un dam against the Pacific (1950).

Yes, Duras was always critical, with her own (communists, feminists, writers...) and with herself.

"Duras's ideological itinerary from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s reflects the contradictions of a time marked by World War II, orthodox communism, May '68 and feminist struggles," says Roma.

In 1950, after six years of militancy, Duras was expelled from the French Communist Party for "nymphomaniac, arrogant and of loose morals", like other intellectuals such as her colleague

(although he was not accused of nymphomania).

In addition to clearly positioning herself against the war in Algeria or in favor of the decriminalization of abortion (she was one of the signatories, together with Beauvoir or

of the

in which they admitted having had an abortion), in 1970 she was arrested after protests over the controversial death of a Malian worker in Aubervilliers at the hands of a police officer.

Her political and social commitment has always been a hard brand, like her iconic uniform with horn-rimmed glasses and a black vest.

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