More Duras

A few posts ago, I recalled the story of Marguerite Duras' young years in Colonial Indochina, and her affair with the son of a Chinese landowner. This affair formed the basis of her short book, 'The Lover'. I became intrigued by this story and went to amazon.com to purchase the book.

While I was browsing, I learned that Duras also wrote the screenplay for the movie 'Hiroshima Mon Amour', the black and white film made in 1959 by Alain Resnais. Apparently this is 'a cornerstone of French cinema...one of the most influential films of all time.' It is 'the story of a French woman and a Japanese man who become lovers in Hiroshima. The film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present....nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. ...audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story.'

So I bought the DVD, too. Such is today's digital way of browsing. And it can only get better.