Le camion

My trip to LA revived sparkles of "Le Camion" in me, a fascinating film by Marguerite Duras, where I saw some years ago in Duras Film Festival in Chicago. Mesmerized by the style, enchanted by the content, I saw it two times in two days. I wanted to live every moment of the film. I wanted to be a part of the artistic experience. I wanted to be Marguerite Duras sitting beside Depardieu, reading my own script as the camion was driven by an invisible driver through the French landscape.


Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

"One of Marguerite Duras' most radically minimalist features (the title means "The Truck"), this also happens to be one of her best, as well as one of her most accessible. Two kinds of material are intercut: a truck drives through a landscape as Duras reads aloud a script to Gerard Depardieu and replies to his questions about a truck driving through a landscape and picking up a female hitchhiker. Compared to many of this filmmaker's other features, this might be described as Duras without duress; thanks to the skill of the writing and the filmmaking and the charisma of Duras and Depardieu, the expected monotony never entirely settles in because the play between sound and image (including the lovely Beethoven on the sound track) keeps feeding the imagination and the wit and the suggestiveness of the text are both infectious. The film also remains visually fresh throughout; even the shots of Duras and Depardieu with the script never seem purely illustrative."