“[Marguerite Duras] was a fascinating character… indomitable and tireless, who grabbed the world by the throat and said, ‘Look at me.’  But [she was] very intelligent, and able to think of many different strategies for dramatizing the basic facts of her life.” — Edmund White

Author of the autobiographical novel L’Amant, the screenplay Hiroshima mon amour (1959, for director Alain Resnais), and several diaries of the 1940s which play up her Resistance activities and play down her work with the Vichy regime, Duras was well known for telling a few stories many times, in many different ways.

Duras’ fictionalized “memoir of war” La douleur (written contemporaneously with the events it describes but not published until 1985, eleven years before her death) is the basis for a hallucinatory new film directed by Emmanuel Finkiel, a former assistant director for Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

LA DOULEUR / MEMOIR OF WAR stars Mélanie Thierry as Duras, and features Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay, Shulamit Adar, and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as “Morland” (the code name for François Mitterrand during the Resistance).

COLCOA presents the West Coast premiere of the film, followed by a conversation with the director.

LA DOULEUR / MEMOIR OF WAR

Tuesday, April 24, at 5:40 pm.

Directors Guild of America

7920 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood.

Mélanie Thierry as Marguerite Duras in La Douleur / Memoir of War. Image credit: Music Box Films.