“Marguerite Duras par Hélène Bamberger” Opens “In the Words of Duras” Festival
Wednesday night marked the opening of “In the Words of Duras,” a month-long festival of film, theatre, and readings sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States in partnership with Anthology Film Archives, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the French Institute Alliance Française.
In the high-ceilinged, second floor ballroom of the Payne Whitney House, now home to the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, New York-based American actress Kathleen Chalfant joined with French stage and movie actor William Nadylam to read English translations from some of Duras’s most haunting passages. Surrounded by the photographs of Duras taken by Hélène Bamberger (photos of the author’s bedroom and scattered notebooks, Duras in the kitchen, the haunting beaches of Trouville with a tiny figure on the horizon, Duras in a graveyard, and, more mundanely but no less elegant, Duras in the car) the evening opened with Chalfant—whose delicate cheekbones and slim stature are reminiscent of a younger Duras—reading from “Boundless Childhood,” an excerpt from Wartime Writings (1943-49) in which the author reminisces about her mother.
From one extreme of motherhood to another, Nadylam performed with feeling painful passages from “The Horror of Such Love” (also from Wartime Writings (1943-49), in which Duras speaks with the nun who delivered her stillborn baby and discovers its body has been burned before she could ever lay eyes on him. As the awful conversation continues, we find this same nun has suffocated another woman’s healthy child because he was a dwarf: “I baptized him and I sent him straight there [to Heaven],” the nun claims proudly. Later, Duras in her hospital bed is chastised by the head nun for the orange that was given to her by a caretaker, as the nourishing fruit was only intended for mothers who actually gave birth, and, the nun explains, can’t be wasted on non-mothers during a time of war.
Chalfant followed with Duras’ observations about the dynamics of the relationship of a man and a woman at a bar in “The English Couple,” from Emily L (1987). Duras can draw a cruel, brutally honest portrait of humanity, and her exercise into the lives of strangers was no exception.
The readings closed with excerpts from “The Sea Wall,” a joyous passage of young lovers from Wartime Writings (1943-1949) in which Nadylam read the part of the older admirer, begging for a peek at his young love’s body in the bath. Chalfant was the teenage Duras, playfully telling her lover if he likes her body now, he should see her when she is older and even more beautiful.
Hélène Bamberger’s photographic exhibit did just that. In the series of photographs that she took of Duras and her surroundings during the summers that they spent together in Trouville, Normandy, from 1980 to 1994, one sees an elderly woman with the clinging energy and wry smile of youth, calling to mind the famous opening lines of her Prix-Goncourt-winning novel, The Lover:
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
Bamberger’s “Marguerite Duras et Yann Andrea, Les Roches Noires (1990)” recalled this passage. 76-year-old Duras, outdoors, smiles up into Yann’s face as he peers at her from behind a window. Atop her head is a gentleman’s fedora, part of the getup that attracted another lover over 50 years prior, when she was a fifteen-year-old aboard a ferry sliding across the Mekong. In the photograph, Andrea looks at her with devotion, a paper pinwheel flower in a vase a playful offering of love in the windowsill.
It is now Marguerite who is the older, more experienced lover, her “ravaged” face attracting youth for the beauty of its lines, which capture the many years of memories she has chronicled in countless plays and screenplays, novels, and journals.
“Marguerite Duras par Hélène Bamberger” is on exhibit at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy through March 18th.
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