After playing an incestuous mother in Ma Mere (2004) and a homicidal postal worker in La Ceremonie (1995), France’s first lady of cinema Isabelle Huppert is no stranger to controversy. But even she must have been awed by the life of Marguerite Duras – the French writer, film director, resistance fighter, communist and alcoholic who had sex with one brother and tried to murder the other. This week in Shanghai, Huppert reads Duras’ wildly successful novel, L’Amant (The Lover), in her one-woman presentation of How I Met the Master at the SAIC·Shanghai Culture Square.
Born in 1914, near Saigon, then Indochina, to an impoverished colonial family, Duras claimed her widowed mother was unloving and her elder brother was abusive; this drove her and her middle brother into each others’ beds and led her to attempt to murder their mutual tormentor. In Leslie Garis’ New York Times article ‘The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras’ (1991), she said as a thirteen-year-old, she approached the sleeping boy with a knife, but he awoke and broke into hysterical laughter, mirth her mother shared.
But Duras’ extraordinary life was just getting started. After returning to France, she simultaneously worked for the Vichy government and served in the French Resistance – in fact it was her future second husband who helped rescue her first husband from Dachau. She remained a lifelong communist although she hated the party, and her level of alcoholism surprised even her, telling Garis, ‘I’m a real writer, I was a real alcoholic…every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing now when I look back is how I managed to write.’
Her works deal with forbidden romance, power struggles, complex eroticism, an undercurrent of fear and panic, and the interplay between patriotism, guilt, and the races. The Lover was her 48th book, published in 1984 when she was 70; it has since seen 29 foreign editions, has won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, and in 1992 was made into a commercial film.
Termed a fictionalised autobiography, The Lover is about a 15-year-old impoverished colonial girl in Vietnam seduced by the 27-year-old scion of a wealthy Chinese family. This is as much about an uncomfortable sexual awakening as it is a memoir about a difficult, conflicted colonial-era childhood. For example, she agrees to sex but asks that he take her family out for a meal; at dinner, her brothers gorge themselves on free food but cannot look their supposedly racially inferior provider in the face. This uneasy balance is a common theme in Duras’ works.
Also common is Duras’ signature probing dialogue and minimalist storytelling, allowing readers to create their own space. Quotes such as ‘Very early in my life it was too late’ and ‘I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face,’ indicate that this is no supermarket romance. Huppert has taken on a complex role here, but Duras never understood what the fuss was about. According to the Paris Review’s Brian Mastroianni (‘On a Pedestal’ April 27, 2015), Duras once told film director Jean-Jacques Annaud, ‘The Lover is a load of shit. It is an airport novel; I wrote it when I was drunk.’ Decide for yourself.
How I Met the Master SAIC Shanghai Culture Square, 36 Yongjia Lu, near Maoming Nan Lu. Sun 11 Jun. 2pm. 80-880RMB.