The relationship between film and narrative severed-or alternatively reinforced. Duras reads a script to Gerard Depardieu in her house. The script describes the scenario for an imaginary film in which a woman hitches a ride on a truck by the sea and launches into a monologue-with occasional interdictions, responses, questions from the (male) driver-sometimes closing her eyes and launching into song, observing the landscape (apparently inaccurately), hinting at stories, providing vague hints of a family connection (the birth of her daughter's child), a love affair, her disillusionment with the present state of Marxist politics, the complicity of the proletariat's official representatives with those of the power structure they ostensibly seek to overthrow, 'ruin' the only politics. Duras describes this in the conditional tense-this is what she would have said if we had made this film-yet this description is itself scripted, everything under a tight control belying the vagueness, the dissolution, the aimlessness imparted by dialogue and scenario. Depardieu's questions seem, too, to be scripted, his and Duras' eyes fleeting downwards to the pages of script they held even when the dialogue appears spontaneous. They are not the female passenger and the male driver, but of course they cannot not be read as analogues. As in 'Le Navire Night', in which the focus on settings, costumes, the process of make-up, are disconnected from any dramatized acting of the scenarios described, film becomes a record of narration rather than an embodiment of what's narrated; but as one critic points out, perhaps this makes 'Le Camion' more truly a 'narrative film' than any conventional film narrative.
The film cuts between Duras and Depardieu, filmed in one setting at night, in another at dusk; between shots, filmed from a moving vehicle, of the landscape-factories, lorry parks, the edges of towns constituting neither the urban built environment nor the rural; spaces of transport and passage-and shots of the titular blue lorry travelling through it, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations intermittently coming and going as if on the truck's radio. Duras notes in her script that the film could be shot in various different locales-all of them outside the metropolitan centre, through-spaces, neglected spaces, a 'land of migrants'. As such, they destabilise notions of national belonging, of the power relations read into landscape, while suggesting the fate of the economic periphery, that to the side of dominant narratives, in a manner far removed from the conventional representational framings of social realism, cinema verité, and the like. Like the room in which Duras and Depardieu read, the script describes the lorry's cabin as both darkroom and prison, safe house and space of incarceration. "I feel as though you and I, too, are threatened by the same light that they are frightened of; the fear that all of a sudden the lorry's cab, this darkroom, may be flooded by a stream of light, you see...The fear of a catastrophe: political intelligence /understanding." Is that fear the fear of political intelligence, or is its fear political intelligence in itself? What might this catastrophe be, insulated but constantly on the move? Is this even all an extended metaphor for the 'fellow traveller'? The film that would have been-yet which, in its rehearsal, retelling, conjectural description, is a film-is that stand in for the idea of revolution, of a non-derailed, non-betrayed communism that refuses compromises with the established order, in what Duras describes as a bargain between capitalism and socialism, "the infinite delay of any free revolution".
"Several explanations would have been possible".
The film cuts between Duras and Depardieu, filmed in one setting at night, in another at dusk; between shots, filmed from a moving vehicle, of the landscape-factories, lorry parks, the edges of towns constituting neither the urban built environment nor the rural; spaces of transport and passage-and shots of the titular blue lorry travelling through it, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations intermittently coming and going as if on the truck's radio. Duras notes in her script that the film could be shot in various different locales-all of them outside the metropolitan centre, through-spaces, neglected spaces, a 'land of migrants'. As such, they destabilise notions of national belonging, of the power relations read into landscape, while suggesting the fate of the economic periphery, that to the side of dominant narratives, in a manner far removed from the conventional representational framings of social realism, cinema verité, and the like. Like the room in which Duras and Depardieu read, the script describes the lorry's cabin as both darkroom and prison, safe house and space of incarceration. "I feel as though you and I, too, are threatened by the same light that they are frightened of; the fear that all of a sudden the lorry's cab, this darkroom, may be flooded by a stream of light, you see...The fear of a catastrophe: political intelligence /understanding." Is that fear the fear of political intelligence, or is its fear political intelligence in itself? What might this catastrophe be, insulated but constantly on the move? Is this even all an extended metaphor for the 'fellow traveller'? The film that would have been-yet which, in its rehearsal, retelling, conjectural description, is a film-is that stand in for the idea of revolution, of a non-derailed, non-betrayed communism that refuses compromises with the established order, in what Duras describes as a bargain between capitalism and socialism, "the infinite delay of any free revolution".
"Several explanations would have been possible".