Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 200: Sun Jul 21

The Long Absence (Colpi, 1961): ICA Cinema, 2.30pm

This is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed by Henri Colpi—editor of Alain Resnais’ first two features, Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad—and coscripted by Marguerite Duras, this melancholy tone poem focuses on a woman who runs a workers’ cafe in a dingy Paris suburb and an amnesiac derelict she comes to believe is her long-lost husband, who apparently was deported to Germany during the war and may have died there. Decidedly pre-New Wave in its conventional narrative style, though attractively filmed in black-and-white ‘Scope, this picture, which won the grand prize at Cannes in 1961, is interesting today mainly as a haunting period piece.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.