Le navire Night

Le navire Night is a thought-provoking and rewarding experiment in cinematic modernism, challenging the conventional relationship between sound, image, and narrative. A trio of top European actors—Bulle Ogier, Dominique Sanda, and Mathieu Carrière—stars in this recently restored film. In her uncompromising and subversive approach, Marguerite Duras employed the ostensible-film-within-a-film format used so cleverly in Le camion to tell of an extraordinary love affair conducted entirely by telephone. The voices of Duras and fellow filmmaker Benoît Jacquot provide the dialogue and narrate the movements of the actors. This is a bold directorial intervention, part Kabuki, part Sacha Guitry, pure Duras.