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CET AMOUR-LÀ Send This Review to a Friend
As far as performances go, the great French actress Jeanne Moreau reigns playing celebrated writer Marguerite Duras in "Cet Amour-Là," directed by Josée Dayan. In one of her finest roles Moreau plays Duras in the final phase of her life--ill, dying, angry, frustrated. Moreau runs the gamut of emotions and is fiercely credible as a woman who wants to retain her dignity as her life wanes.
She both revels in the adoration expressed for her by much younger lover and devotee, Yann Andrea (Aymeric Demarigny), in whom she finds comfort when she is not kicking him out in order to retreat into loneliness, which at times she believes the best way to face her impending death.
This is certainly a grand tour de force for Moreau, who gives us an intricate picture of the influential writer as a proud woman privately filled with self-doubt but still conscious of her importance in the realm of literature. Moreau makes her worldly, yet quietly desperate and bent on preserving her dignity in the face of the humiliation of illness and death.
There are so many reasons to remember the work of Moreau, one of France's great actresses, but this one should linger in memory as one of her defining roles in a long, exciting career.
Dayan's screenplay is written in the haunting, poetic style that Duras used in her writing, making the result a fitting blend of character and technique. The film was inspired by Andrea's book of the same title. Think of "Cet amour-là" as somewhat of an intellectual "Harold and Maude." A New Yorker Films release.
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