One chilly afternoon in 1982, the writer Yann Andréa sat in front of his friend the journalist Michèle Manceaux in the attic of the mansion that he and the filmmaker and literary Marguerite Duras, his partner, shared in Neauphle-le-Château, about fifty kilometers from Paris. Beyond the age difference —Duras was 38 years older—, what bothered Andréa about their relationship, born of the former's unbridled passion for the latter's art, was his homosexuality. Manceux started the tape recorder, with no further intention other than Andréa to verbalize his pain and feelings, and he began to speak. Those cassettes were left in the hands of the journalist, and it was only after their deaths that Andréa's sister recovered them, transcribed them and published them in 2016. That is the basis of
I want to talk about Duras,
the film by the French Claire Simon, which bears a neat testimony of that conversation, and which is competing at the San Sebastián festival.
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Yann Andréa discovered Duras at the age of 20, when he was studying Philosophy in Caen. Impressed by his literature, he decided that he would not read to anyone else for the rest of his life. In 1975 he went to a screening with a discussion of
India Song
, Duras's sixth film, and after Andréa's public reflection on the final shot they ended up having drinks with other university students. For the next five years, he sent her a daily letter, until he was fed up with her not replying to him, he gave up and only then did Duras, a star of literature and cinema, a capital figure in France in the second half of the century. XX, decided to listen to him.
It was 1980 and there began a relationship that only ended after the death of Duras at the age of 81, in 1996. Those were years in which the figure of Andréa - who was actually called Yann Lemée, Duras forced him to change it to use as Yann's mother's surname, Andréa, appears as a ghost in her work, while Andréa himself wrote novels to some extent autobiographical that literary critics ridiculed, considering him a simple addition to Duras. Inside they lived 16 years of brutal relationship, in which the writer humiliated, tyrannized and mistreated him. Alcohol macerated that violence. "All men are potential homosexuals, they just need to know it," wrote Duras.
However, one could not live without the other, and she found in him her own literary awakening and someone to enslave, on whom to pour out her volcanic character.
Andréa also became his personal secretary.
That afternoon in 1982 Andréa sees coming, like a fish wrapped around the fisherman's net, the future impossibility of getting out of that relationship.
Simon has taken a couple of artistic risks: the first, almost obvious, is that the viewer does not see Duras;
the second is to let the conversation flow on the screen as if it were a play, and thus illustrate the oppression that grips Andréa.
Claire Simon, in the center, with Swann Arlaud and Emmanuelle Devos at the presentation of 'I want to talk about Duras.' Juan Herrero / EFE
“I grew up with Duras's literature - my mother, who didn't read much if she followed Duras - but I want to emphasize that this is a movie about Yann. The text contains the story, the beings, it is a file that we have converted into image and sound, a translation of the emotion that I experienced when I read it ”, Claire Simon told this Monday in San Sebastián, who confessed the impression it caused on her the book when she read it in 2016. "So much so that I read it again, and although it looked like theater material, and so I recommended it to a friend, it finally became my movie," recalled the director and photographer, a veteran documentary filmmaker, about her fifth fiction feature film. “For me everything is cinema, I do not differentiate between documentary and fiction. The original text was already there, you just had to display it,make it present for the viewer and work with Swann Arlaud [who plays Andréa] and Emmanuelle Devos [who plays Michèle Manceaux]. I knew that this story was more universal than just the depiction of Andréa and Duras' relationship, which is actually the love between two people ”. Although he haggled over any influence from Duras filmmaker: “Mine is something else. I had to avoid the terrible possibility that there were two people talking on television, and at the same time that the public was clear that there was indeed a sexual relationship between Duras and Andréa ", something that he illustrates with watercolors that dot the footage," drawings that show bodies and desire ”.which is actually the love between two people ”. Although he haggled over any influence from Duras filmmaker: “Mine is something else. I had to avoid the terrible possibility that there were two people talking on television, and at the same time that the public was clear that there was indeed a sexual relationship between Duras and Andréa ", something that he illustrates with watercolors that dot the footage," drawings that show bodies and desire ”.which is actually the love between two people ”. Although he haggled over any influence from Duras filmmaker: “Mine is something else. I had to avoid the terrible possibility that there were two people talking on television, and at the same time that the public was clear that there was indeed a sexual relationship between Duras and Andréa ", something that he illustrates with watercolors that dot the footage," drawings that show bodies and desire ”.