La Musica (Duras, 1967): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm
This is the opening night of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA introduction:
In 1966, Marguerite Duras – already established as a prolific writer,
but looking for an escape from the world of publishing – made her debut
as a filmmaker with La Musica, based on a short play she had written a year earlier. Co-directed with Paul Seban – with whom she had made television – La Musica is a psychological three-hander that delicately dissects love after separation. The paths of two women and a man cross in a provincial town in the North
of France. A young American woman (Julie Dassin, who, for Duras,
possessed “a kind of wildness combined with a certain purity”) accosts
the man (Robert Hossein) in a café. She is ostensibly on holiday, though
the true reasons behind her stay are less clear. They spend the
afternoon together. He is there to formalise his divorce from a woman
(the ever-marvellous Delphine Seyrig), in the town in which they had
once lived. In an empty hotel, the couple has a final conversation: with
corridors, rooms and lobbies providing containers for their
reminiscences, confessions, and renewed feelings. With exquisite staging
and camerawork by Sacha Vierny, who had worked on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, this screening of La Musica is a New Wave-adjacent primer to Duras’s filmic universe.
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