In her seventieth year, Marguerite Duras has not only published a novel, L'amant, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, but she brings us a marvelous piece of absurdist cinema that is, on one level at least, her most entertaining and accessible work to date. Les Enfants concerns a seven-year-old boy, Ernesto, who is portrayed by a forty-year-old man (Axel Bougousslavsky). In his child's wisdom, Ernesto decides to quit school, since knowledge can count for nothing in a meaningless world. His lament concerning Creation ("Everything was there and it wasn't worth it--at all, at all, at all") has shades of Woody Allen's bespectacled youth who stops studying because "the universe is expanding." But in Duras' universe it is a soulful mother (Tatiana Moukhine) who, although bemused, will never deny support to her precocious child, while the father (Daniel Gélin) shouts "Ça, alors!" Within the effectively stark and static framework which Duras has established throughout her oeuvre, rarely have the nuances of character been given such free play--nor the human condition been decried with such warm, sad humor.