Intellectually explosive material here from Duras, which got her booed at Cannes. Highly feminist without providing any signposting as such. I guess a point is that a lorry driver and a millionaire, are both men, and this similarity brings them closer together than a man and a woman. Both a communist and a capitalist fixate on the material. Karl Marx and Adam Smith are both men. Marguerite Duras hopes you are very angry reading this.
OK, so what set of images and sounds do we have here? We have two types of scenes, either scenes of a blue lorry amongst industrial sprawl, or Marguerite Duras herself and Gerard Depardieu talking through a script about a hitch-hiker and a lorry driver. Duras' modus operandi with many of her films is to get you to see the real images of the film in your head, with the actual images on the screen merely your facilitator. You are to complete the story (as when you read a book). As it is, even this is difficult as the physical progress of the story is monotonous, however we are free to luxuriate and terrify ourselves in the simple yet sublime task of imagining the ocean, for example.
Collusion between classes is hinted at, a pact to mutilate our true selves. Dismayed talk about children being trained to be less personal foreshadows a later work, Les Enfants.
The images from Bruno Nyutten are almost paradoxically beautiful, how can the devastated countryside soothe the eyes so much? Rows of spindly leafless trees benefit from the accompanying Diabelli variations, and magic hour filming works its magic.
Pauline Kael famously spent two paragraphs dismissing Star Wars and seven paragraphs analysing Le camion, all within the same article around the time both were released (there also followed seven paragraphs on the prison film Short Eyes). Marguerite reveals herself in the film as quite the bright-eyed wampyr, disdainful of the patriarchy. Certainly she deserves triple and then some the attention of Star Wars.
This film is a punishment for being your conditioned self, or a billet-doux. Choose.
