Le Navire Night. 1979. France. Written and directed by Marguerite Duras. With Dominque Sanda, Bulle Ogier, Mathieu Carrière. DCP courtesy Icarus Films. In French; English subtitles. 90 min.
“Every night in Paris,” Marguerite Duras writes, “hundreds of men and women use the anonymity of the unused telephone lines that date from the German occupation to talk to one another, to love one another. These people, these survivors of the shipwreck of love, are dying to love, to leave the abyss of solitude. These people who cry out at night into the abyss make plans to meet. These meetings never come to fruition. It is enough that they are made.” Despairing of turning what she had written into a film, Duras jettisoned the shooting script and instead shot what she called “the disaster of the film”—the dressing of the set, the actors being made up. “Little by little the film emerged from death…. We put the camera the wrong way around and filmed what came towards it: the night, air, spotlights, roads; faces, too.” Later she would observe, “I find the film both beautiful and vain. I believe that people who don’t like the film are virgins to desire itself, and that they exercise their misery as a way of damning those who are always ready to sink into that primary state, the temptation of love, the ones they share with the beasts, the madmen, the majority.”