THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Claire Simon’s latest feature film marks a new step aside from the documentary path that she regularly walks, without however falling into fiction stricto sensu. You only want me borrows a lot of fictional processes, but fiction is never anything more than a means to access the reality of an archive, which it is a question of incarnating, in order to lend it a cinematographic life – which it had already done with The Offices of God in 2008. This archive is the interviews that the journalist Michèle Manceaux (1933-2015) conducted with Yann Andréa (1952-2014), two consecutive days in 1982, in Neauphles-le-Château (Yvelines) in the house of Marguerite Duras, with whom the ex-student of barely 30 years old, not yet a writer, had lived for two years. Having remained unpublished for a long time, more or less voluntarily left aside by Andréa himself, these tapes finally experienced a posthumous publication in 2016 (I would like to talk about DurasEd. Pauvert/Fayard).
Claire Simon therefore undertakes not to play, but to “replay” (the distinction is important, because the scene has already taken place), this text by two actors, Swann Arlaud in the skin of Andréa, Emmanuelle Devos in that of Manceaux , while Duras, kept offscreen (except for a fleeting appearance), hovers over the scene with all her inquisitive absence.
Andréa looks back over all of “their” story, which begins in his head alone when, studying philosophy in Caen, the young man discovers Duras by The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) and took on a devastating passion for his work, going so far as to isolate himself socially and write dozens of unanswered letters to the author. Then comes their first meeting, during a screening ofIndia Song (1975) in Caen, then, later, the “adoption” by Duras, at the age of 70, of this stranger, who becomes his servant and his lover, caught in a balance of power as implacable as it is unilateral. Finally comes into play the question of his own homosexuality, not completely repressed.
Comedians on the line
The field of relational complexity covered here is dizzying. Brilliantly supported by actors with a string, who never seek to mimic their models, the dialogue scenes are the strongest, the word opening onto the abysses of amorous submission that goes as far as self-annihilation – the fact of speaking being for Andréa, despite everything, a survival reflex. Claire Simon favors long takes and the slight oscillation of a camera that slides from one interlocutor to another, listening being as important as confessing.
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