'Le Navire Night': Night as ship, the talk at the end of sea but the shots of land, Duras' characteristic slow-panning camera the only waves there are those of wind amidst woods, grass, the baroque explosion of statues on the face of a chateau, streets deserted at night, empty at dawn, the space of human inhabitation free of their inhabitants. Instead, the mechanism of films, of theatre, of narration (the story told here was almost simultaneously released as a prose text, a play, and a film) is constantly drawn attention to: shots of a blackboard on which are written the lines we have just heard spoken; an early and mysterious shot of what is revealed to be the lighting apparatus for the shots we go on to see (above); a slow track across a red dress we then see Dominique Sanda wear; talk of the film that could not be made, as the actors seem in perpetual rehearsal, having make-up applied (by Duras' herself, her hands coming in from the edge of the shot as the actors appear to be about to speak, their mouths opening but remaining silent), asking her questions about the narrative they 're-create', closing their eyes as the story describes. In that story itself, we find characters rendered only by acronyms, Duras' perpetual man and woman, encountering each other through an unlisted telephone line and conducting an affair that, for years, is all talk-an endless phone conversation at night, a 'cry' that would be made worse, rather than solved, by meeting, even by the material trace of a photograph one sends the other; the woman dying of leukemia, an heiress, bed-ridden, forbidden to leave the house; once more, desire sublimated into endless stories, any or all of which may be true or untrue, landscape or urban-scape, the space of abandonment or habitation, characterised by Duras' slow-roving camera by perpetual absence. In the story-recited by Duras herself, along with assistant director Benoit Jacquot-the phone conversations are, in a sense, rehearsals for the meeting that never comes and would betray them; likewise, the presence of the actors in the house/'set' here do not so much enact roles or characters as hover on the edge of enactment, the shift from spoken word into visuality on which Duras' films and which she seems to distrust. All the elements of film-words, actors, faces, settings, lighting, costume-are presented as separate entities-a musician is occasionally glimpsed or heard like a whisper playing a simple piano figure, echoing the endless melody of 'Baxter, Vera Baxter'-the film carrying on after the end of the story to describe the impossibility of making, or ending a film (the same thing); ships that pass in the night or the ship that passes in the night, talking against absence, death, across the distance those very words maintain.
