Les Enfants (Duras, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6pm
This film (35mm) is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here.
ICA introduction:
Co-written with Jean-Marc Turine and her son, Jean Mascolo, Marguerite Duras’s last film Les Enfants
is, in her words, “an endlessly desperate comedy whose subject has
something to do with knowledge”, and was inspired by her reading of
Ecclesiastes. The film’s protagonist is seven-year-old Ernesto (played
by Axel Bogousslavsky who, at the time, was 38), who – much to the
dismay of his traditional parents (Daniel Gélin and Tatiana Moukhine) –
refuses to go to school “because they teach me things I don’t know”. Les Enfants
is a philosophical fable that postulates childhood as a redress to
societal failings, and celebrates resistance to a failing education
system (one that May ’68 was, in the end, not able to rehabilitate). In
Duras’s words: “Ernesto takes on the whole world: God, America,
chemistry, knowledge, Marx and Hegel, the great mathematical powerhouses
of the world. He has no popular ideas. He has no recipes, no
principles, no morals. Ernesto is a hero."
Here (and above) is an extract.
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