The Worst Film Ever

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

not enough lines, but full of cinematic words. i can say it's a dictionary of cinematic words. it's silent but eloquence. real an intelligence. if you can't understand those words, you can' understand what Duras wanted to say. you know that's a loss of your life. blond hair-black hair, light color clothes-dark color clothes.... what do you think of that? maybe it's just a whim of the director. water-mirror. you can look in the water what reflects. do you recognize him or her? what if, you don't know someone reflects in water instead of you? what you gonna do? deny or affirm? is it really someone you don't know? listen to the radio. it's interesting. Polanski once use this method in Knife in the water. i witness in this film, that Duras moved by the several works of great Antonioni.

I just saw Nathalie Granger for the first time this morning, and must say that I am now both highly impressed and deeply moved by the experience. Impressed with the professional execution of what must be a difficult script to shoot. Moved by the strange combination of quiet serenity and uneasy claustrophobia produced by the interacting of the silent femmes and the Gothic looking house, garden and pond. That this was the very house Duras lived in may also contribute to the experience.The professionalism is perhaps not so surprising. The beautiful black and white cinematography is by Ghislain Cloquet. He worked with Alain Resnais in the fifties but for me his most important work is for Robert Bresson: Au hazard Balthasar, Mouchette and Une femme douce; three of the most captivating movies I have ever seen. As for the actors, both Bose and Moreau have worked with Antonioni, and the latter of course also with Truffaut and Bunuel. The meeting of these people with the dense script of one the major writers of the time should call for the utmost attention on the side of the viewer; every scene invites close inspection as well as an open mind to what we are seeing just as much as what we are not seeing, a presence or an absence. We may not see much on the screen but, contrary to other reports on this site, I would not call Nathalie Granger a minimalist work. I find it to be as full of mystery as any tale of horror you might name, even if the means involved may be sparse. Indeed (perhaps due to dark Isabelle lurking about draped in her long, black cape by the gloomy pond in the overgrown garden), the film has as much a vampirish look as Dreyer's Vampyr or Jean Rollin's Le viol de Vampire. And this look is completely justified by the ongoing killings in the vicinity as well as the statement uttered that Isabelle's problematic daughter Nathalie "would like to kill someone". The conflict between these horrors, and the quiet mood surrounding the characters, creates a tension in a most skillful way; the effect on a receptive mind can be shattering.The professionalism therefore, might be taken for granted, but many professionally made movies do not move me. This does, and almost as much as the Bresson films mentioned above. But where Bresson, as well as Dreyer, work within a spiritual context that might more easily produce transcendence, Duras, more in tradition of Antonioni perhaps, works without spirituality, at least without the presence of spirituality. Yet I might call the effect the film has on me as transcendent. Why? It may be precisely the very absence that contributes to the paradox that this art of the void can work its mysterious wonders. Even the few, uncertain notes of Nathalie's piano practice that constantly accompanies the silence of the rooms, seem to contribute to the experience. She may be giving up music, but it seems that her life is breathing in these few notes. If the music stops, then what will happen? So, although the cinematography and the settings might create their own poetry, I think it is the story of Nathalie that moves me. We know from the school reports that Nathalie is in trouble, we also know that it is her film, at least it is named after her. Yet we do not see much of her. But we do hear her, her playing is setting the mood. And in the empty rooms, we may also look for her, even it is clear that she is not there. But we see her things: "This belongs to Nathalie, do not touch", a note says. Her absence is present. So what? So she may be in the garden chasing the black cat, but even that without much luck. When she tries to put the cat in the baby carriage, it runs away. She kicks the carriage violently over. Are we to assume some sort of correspondence between the unseen killers and the poor Nathalie? In a different script she would run away and become their victim of course, but in this film we are left to wonder about her destiny. There are many such uncertainties, and they all do their tiny bit of work on the bewildered spectators, of which at least I might say that I will certainly watch this film again, and that with still greater expectations. I do not usually become so moved by works of cinema, so any viewing that make me write a review within an instant, I will take good care of. Well, Nathalie Granger, up on the top of my shelf you go, beside the other greats. Just one hesitation, though: The interlude of the intruding washing machine salesman, hilariously played by the then fresh Depardieu, although indeed very funny in itself, might be a problem: Precisely because it seems to stand alone. With the women we might just gaze at him in wonder, and agree, as they say, that "you are not a salesman". But, I could add, we might also say: "You do not belong here", that is, in this film. But the women, however, seem amused. He could be from another planet as far as they are concerned. There are just two scenes with Depardieu, but they tend to dominate far too much, as the very presence of this big and clumsy man (which we also now may have seen too much of in later movies) is all it takes to relieve our mind of young and tender Nathalie, at least while he is on the screen. He is a spectacle in himself. The women are diverted for a while. So are we. But is this comic interlude necessary? At the moment, I am not sure, at least I cannot see why.

Two of the four reviews on this site say in essence, "I'm a fan of minimalist cinema but this is too minimalist." Well, I'm not a fan of minimalist cinema. I wanted to see this movie because Duras wrote Hiroshima Mon Amour, one of the greatest movies of all time, but within twelve minutes I had a very bad feeling. You hear a news report, two women exchange a few words, one makes a phone call, then they clean the kitchen table, slowly and thoroughly, then they go into the kitchen and clean up their, and one makes another phone call, and I'm thinking, is this really the movie? So then I read the four reviews here, two dismissive, two ecstatic (but suggesting that this is a movie where the viewer has to fill in the gaps) and I decided that life is short and 12 minutes of this movie is quite enough.

Elliptical . . you are invited to project into the gaps. I find an atmosphere of unbearable tension, depression, grief, apprehension,watching two women living with some persistent post-traumatic stigma, unexplained, in a waiting that never ends. Something to do with the mother's unique, uncommunicable anguish over a very bad, violent, abnormal daughter. We never learn what she did or see her misbehave, we imagine the worst and her most innocent behavior seems unnerving, suggestive of evil. A double anguish, also having to do with a pair of depraved teenage boy killers on the loose in the neighborhood. Did they kill someone in the family? Or are they perhaps family members? Do the two women know something about these boys that the police don't? A numbed mood with its own rapturous nuances, separates them from the street world in front of the house, and the equally claustrophobic garden world in back of the house, the absolutely still house. Great actresses are denied the opportunity to act, a kind of negative violence which causes amazement and discomfort. By bizarre contrast, suddenly a radiant 24 year-old Depardieu, as an awkward vacuum cleaner salesman, gives a hilarious, virtuosic shaggy dog monologue out of Pinter or Beckett. Virtually his first film, it precedes his official filmography; what a discovery. The film goes nowhere, a fragment, a shard of smoky Durassian flint. The more Duras one already knows, the more one can appreciate this seemingly obscure and tedious film.