One of Marguerite Duras’ most ravishing and
beguiling works, Le navire Night is at once a sumptuous embrace of cinema
and an eloquent denial of it, at least as normally constituted by mainstream
conventions: it credits three recognizable stars (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier,
Mathieu Carriere) who receive just a handful of lines between them and do
little more than sit and stare (although extended sequences of each of them being
made up confirms that classic scopophilic pleasures aren’t entirely jettisoned).
The film’s narrative is told instead through the voice overs of Duras herself
and of assistant director Benoit Jacquot (the film provides glimpses of the
script they’re reading from, in handwritten chalk), starting with a meditation
on Athens and eventually coming to chart the story of a man who on randomly
dialing some numbers “from the telephonic abyss” connects with a woman who
becomes a displaced, mysterious love object, known to him only as “F,” the descriptions
of her appearance and life details unreliably shifting. Other characters are
evoked, complexities and possibilities are set out, and we’re told of various
points when they might have met, or when he might have come to know more about
her, but the possibilities never crystallize, and in the end the story fades
away, perhaps through her death (she says she’s suffering from leukemia), or
through her marriage to another man, the surgeon who was treating her, or
perhaps simply through the impossibility of its continuing forever, or perhaps
extinguished by “general doubt”; the actors leave (to the extent they were ever
there) and the film likewise slips away, Duras continuously thereby emphasizes
the unreliability and contingency of the filmic space created, while yet creating
a sense of rapturous, closely-observed presence, of (in the film’s own words) a
blazing sun at its zenith that simultaneously evokes (or, actually simultaneously
is) the silence of night.
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