Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 269: Tue Oct 1

La Musica (Duras, 1967): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm


This great Marguerite Duras directorial debut also screens on Septmber 29th. Details here.

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.

Here (and above) is an extract.

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