Nathalie Granger is the fourth film of French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. In its press release, Duras writes, in Daniella Shreir’s translation: “It is the 10th of April, 1972, for example.”
The film was shot during the first two weeks of April 1972. We witness the day do its work on two women dressed in clothes that match their hair colour. They are slim, quiet columns of black and beige: Isabelle Granger, played by Italian actress Lucia Bosè, and an unnamed woman—in the screenplay, she is called The Friend—played by Jeanne Moreau. Together and apart, they perform various domestic rituals in near-total silence.
The press release, which reads like a short fiction, continues: “The 10th of April, 1972: another possible title for the film. A day like any other. But irreplaceably dated. Completely disposed of, carried away, burnt.” It is a day that informs the inert circumstance of the cigarette in Jeanne Moreau’s hand: seemingly always in need of a good flick, its inch of ash at constant risk of collapse. It is a film that is irreplaceably dated—dated like a diary entry, or a letter written in blue ink on yellow paper, or the décor of this house in Neauphle that Duras, in 1972, had already lived in for fourteen years.
"It is a day that informs the inert circumstance of the cigarette in Jeanne Moreau’s hand: seemingly always in need of a good flick, its inch of ash at constant risk of collapse."
This house is itself a character; it has lines, creaks, silences, and stage directions. The footsteps of Isabelle and The Friend are never heard in the house—Duras wrote this fact into the script. There is a black cat; there is an empty bassinet; there is a piano. Duras called this house, with relation to the film, La maison des femmes, the house of women. In other interviews she called it, with relation to her books, the house in which all of her women had once lived.
April 10, 1972 was a Monday. The day is framed by the departure and return from school of two young girls, Laurence and Nathalie Granger. It is Nathalie Granger that gives the film its title, as well as its foreboding charge. Nathalie is being kicked out of school because of her bad behaviour, which we hear described by her schoolteacher in the first words of the film: “She has made up all these stories lately. That you’re not feeding her, that you live in squalor, et cetera, et cetera. The other day she hit a student—for nothing, something about a missing eraser. There have always been good and bad students. That’s familiar territory for me. But the other stuff… this violence… in such a little girl.”
Coursing beneath these words: a piano tuned slightly flat, an étude played by unsteady hands. Then, a radio tuned to a local news station that is delivering updates on a manhunt; two killers are being chased by the police in a nearby region. They are young boys. It’s a “race against the clock.” We learn that one has blond hair, and the other has dark hair, just like Moreau and Bosè—a coincidence that feels at once arbitrary and profound, like most instances of rhyme, fate, and colour coordination.
Off-screen, on April 10, 1972, in Hollywood, William Friedkin’s The French Connection—which follows the pursuit of a French criminal—won five Academy Awards.
Duras goes on, in the press release, to imagine a woman, 300 years earlier to the day, who once walked the premises of what would become Duras’s house and the setting for this film. “The filmmaker sees a woman moving across what in the future will become a white terrace. On the 10th of April in 1672, this woman looks doleful. 300 years ago to the day. No wind that day. On this 10th of April in 1972, other women are walking across the same plot of land. Doleful, too, but these women are silent. They are occupying the premises trodden by the woman who, 300 years earlier to the day, had felt hot and had conveyed this information in the form of a softly articulated complaint.”
What does the reader see? I look at my copy of the French screenplay alongside the English translation, and I reframe the question. What doesn’t the reader see? Two words in the French original that seem to have been forgotten in the English translation: short words that describe the weather, and directly precede the date Duras bestows the film: “Ondée. Vent.” Rain showers. Wind.
The reader learns about the weather of another 10th Monday in April, this time in Indonesia, in 1815: the climax of the deadliest volcanic eruption ever recorded in human history. Volcano Tambora was its name. Ash rained down for weeks; 100,000 people were killed in its aftermath. The following year became known as “The Year Without Summer”; crops failed, global temperatures dropped by two to seven degrees Fahrenheit, and in June, in Albany, New York, snow blanketed the ground. I don’t know how the wind was affected by the explosion of Mount Tambora. But 157 years later to the day, inside a fiction, itself played out in Duras’s real house, Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè sit across from a young Gerard Depardieu, who plays—in his first role of note—a travelling salesman. He is there to sell a washing machine called, incredibly, the Vedetta Tambour 008.
The appearance of a volcano in this essay is as random as the idea of a brightly coloured washing machine stammered by a salesman—whose footsteps we do hear—inside the house of women. Like the unspooling of an afternoon, it imparts no meaning. The cigarette in Jeanne Moreau’s hand contains the memory of 31 cubic miles of ash: “completely disposed of, carried away, burnt”: April 10, 1972. For example.
Nathalie Granger is the fourth film of French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. In its press release, Duras writes, in Daniella Shreir’s translation: “It is the 10th of April, 1972, for example.”
The film was shot during the first two weeks of April 1972. We witness the day do its work on two women dressed in clothes that match their hair colour. They are slim, quiet columns of black and beige: Isabelle Granger, played by Italian actress Lucia Bosè, and an unnamed woman—in the screenplay, she is called The Friend—played by Jeanne Moreau. Together and apart, they perform various domestic rituals in near-total silence.
The press release, which reads like a short fiction, continues: “The 10th of April, 1972: another possible title for the film. A day like any other. But irreplaceably dated. Completely disposed of, carried away, burnt.” It is a day that informs the inert circumstance of the cigarette in Jeanne Moreau’s hand: seemingly always in need of a good flick, its inch of ash at constant risk of collapse. It is a film that is irreplaceably dated—dated like a diary entry, or a letter written in blue ink on yellow paper, or the décor of this house in Neauphle that Duras, in 1972, had already lived in for fourteen years.
"It is a day that informs the inert circumstance of the cigarette in Jeanne Moreau’s hand: seemingly always in need of a good flick, its inch of ash at constant risk of collapse."
This house is itself a character; it has lines, creaks, silences, and stage directions. The footsteps of Isabelle and The Friend are never heard in the house—Duras wrote this fact into the script. There is a black cat; there is an empty bassinet; there is a piano. Duras called this house, with relation to the film, La maison des femmes, the house of women. In other interviews she called it, with relation to her books, the house in which all of her women had once lived.
April 10, 1972 was a Monday. The day is framed by the departure and return from school of two young girls, Laurence and Nathalie Granger. It is Nathalie Granger that gives the film its title, as well as its foreboding charge. Nathalie is being kicked out of school because of her bad behaviour, which we hear described by her schoolteacher in the first words of the film: “She has made up all these stories lately. That you’re not feeding her, that you live in squalor, et cetera, et cetera. The other day she hit a student—for nothing, something about a missing eraser. There have always been good and bad students. That’s familiar territory for me. But the other stuff… this violence… in such a little girl.”
Coursing beneath these words: a piano tuned slightly flat, an étude played by unsteady hands. Then, a radio tuned to a local news station that is delivering updates on a manhunt; two killers are being chased by the police in a nearby region. They are young boys. It’s a “race against the clock.” We learn that one has blond hair, and the other has dark hair, just like Moreau and Bosè—a coincidence that feels at once arbitrary and profound, like most instances of rhyme, fate, and colour coordination.
Off-screen, on April 10, 1972, in Hollywood, William Friedkin’s The French Connection—which follows the pursuit of a French criminal—won five Academy Awards.
Duras goes on, in the press release, to imagine a woman, 300 years earlier to the day, who once walked the premises of what would become Duras’s house and the setting for this film. “The filmmaker sees a woman moving across what in the future will become a white terrace. On the 10th of April in 1672, this woman looks doleful. 300 years ago to the day. No wind that day. On this 10th of April in 1972, other women are walking across the same plot of land. Doleful, too, but these women are silent. They are occupying the premises trodden by the woman who, 300 years earlier to the day, had felt hot and had conveyed this information in the form of a softly articulated complaint.”
What does the reader see? I look at my copy of the French screenplay alongside the English translation, and I reframe the question. What doesn’t the reader see? Two words in the French original that seem to have been forgotten in the English translation: short words that describe the weather, and directly precede the date Duras bestows the film: “Ondée. Vent.” Rain showers. Wind.
The reader learns about the weather of another 10th Monday in April, this time in Indonesia, in 1815: the climax of the deadliest volcanic eruption ever recorded in human history. Volcano Tambora was its name. Ash rained down for weeks; 100,000 people were killed in its aftermath. The following year became known as “The Year Without Summer”; crops failed, global temperatures dropped by two to seven degrees Fahrenheit, and in June, in Albany, New York, snow blanketed the ground. I don’t know how the wind was affected by the explosion of Mount Tambora. But 157 years later to the day, inside a fiction, itself played out in Duras’s real house, Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè sit across from a young Gerard Depardieu, who plays—in his first role of note—a travelling salesman. He is there to sell a washing machine called, incredibly, the Vedetta Tambour 008.
The appearance of a volcano in this essay is as random as the idea of a brightly coloured washing machine stammered by a salesman—whose footsteps we do hear—inside the house of women. Like the unspooling of an afternoon, it imparts no meaning. The cigarette in Jeanne Moreau’s hand contains the memory of 31 cubic miles of ash: “completely disposed of, carried away, burnt”: April 10, 1972. For example.