Memoir of War

I've watched some rubbish/flawed films and have found something to help me work around whatever was wrong with them. This film had nothing. It was slow, and boring. The characters weren't interesting me and I didn't like the cinematography. The overall look of the film was drab and grey.

War causes pain in many ways. La douleur focuses on one that usually goes unnoticed. It is a character study of Marguerite, a woman waiting for her husband who has been arrested by the Germans and nobody knows what happened to him. Is he alive? Is he dead? The only thing she can do is torturously wait without having any clue. She desperately tries to get a French agent's help, but deep inside she knows it's a vain attempt.

The movie succeeds in creating the surreal feeling of "freezing time". Days are endlessly passing by and she isn't living, she is just a detached observer. This effect is done through the extremely slow narrative, Melanie Thierry's performance, the camera work (e.g. Many closeups, or the scene where she looks herself in the mirror, an outsider in her own life).

SUM UP : you read the book and liked it ? -> GO see the movie! Not read or read and not liked? -> GO see another movie!

STORY The story is about a wife that has no information about the return of her husband that went to war. So she tries to find out what happend to him.

NOTHING BUT PAIN The film is full of pain, and is very slow, just l ike the book I heard. I would say that, while the crew might have done a great job turning the book into a move, the movie was not enjoyable: I go to movies to feel emotions, and I did not feel any but pain in this one. I had to leave the movie after 1H30 min because I was just losing my time.

RATING 4 because the cast was nice, and as said, the crew did a fine job given the book..

"In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible." Pearl Witherington Cornioley

While many on all sides of WWII suffered immeasurably, along with them was Marguerite (Melanie Thierry), not suffering the physical slings but emotionally tortured waiting for the return during liberation of her imprisoned resistance husband, Robert (Emmanuel Bourdieu). Memoir of War is a slow burn of waiting, expertly paralleling her longing for his return as we suffer a long but engrossing expectation with her.

Director/writer Emmanuel Finkiel, skillfully adapting the discursive Marguerite Duras novel, based on her experience, provides a linear story that simmers with desire for Robert's return while she spurns attention from a resistance colleague, Dionys (Benjamin Biolay), and a Nazi collaborator Pierre Rabier (Benoit Magimel). Finkiel's constant closeups of her cinematic face reveal the subtle torture she goes through as she spurns Dionys's advances and barters with Rabier for her husband's return.

After the Rabier sequences, the film almost exclusively centers on her turmoil of waiting until a denouement worthy of a potboiler depicting the converging conflicts of her loyalty in the face of Robert's imminent return. The film successfully immerses us in her waiting and her conflicts, as anyone who has, for instance, endured the slow death of a loved one to a disease. I suspect that torture is similar to waiting for a prisoner to return, probably a skeleton of himself looking already close to death if not almost there already.

Memoir of War, depicting the life of an acclaimed memorist, novelist, and author of the classic Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), is not for the frequently ADD American audience (admittedly, it is too long for almost any audience); it belongs to the province of thoughtful cinephiles who love the quiet characterization of grand souls in conflict.

Superhero film this is not; classic European filmmaking with a substantial heroine it is.

The book isn't an easy read, it feels like being trapped into the author's head: this can be a problem because entering another person's subjectivity is always tricky and a source of misunderstanding.

The movie suffers from the same problem and this is why I didn't really like it. The voice over is extremely pervasive (we're bordering audiobook territory here) while nothing, or almost nothing, happens on screen.

In short, watching this movie without having read the book would be a pointless experience imho.