Memoir of War

Club Cert: Now showing, IFI Marguerite Duras’s book, La Douleur (Pain) is the source material for this thoughtprovoking French film.

Writer-director Emmanuel Finkiel uses two of the book’s six segments and is faithful to Duras’s genre-defying style. But you can put a book down, a film you have to stick with and, but for Melanie Thierry’s strong central performance, this could have permanently skidded over the line into tedious.

In 1944 Paris, Marguerite (Thierry below) worries for her husband arrested by the Nazis. Her fellow members of the Resistance, Dionys (Benjamin Biolay) and Morland (the real code name of Francois Mitterand) are divided about her informationgathering friendship with a collaborator (Benoit Magimel). Where the film is strongest is showing the end of war not as a time of unmitigated glory, but one of complex emotions.