La Jolla Museum Spotlights Duras, French Culture

There are those who applaud her style for its spare intensity and those who deplore it for being boring and obsessive. But admirers and detractors all agree that the works of Marguerite Duras occupy a special position in France, if not the world.

She is a distinguished novelist who just three years ago, at age 70, won the Prix Goncourt, the highest literary award in France, for her novel “L’Amante” (“The Lover”). Duras also is celebrated for several plays and more than a dozen films. One of them, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” won several international prizes, including the New York Critics Award for best foreign film in 1960.

It is not surprising that Antoinette Fouque, the new president of the San Diego Chapter of Alliance Francaise, leaped at the chance to co-sponsor a French production of Duras’ popular “L’Amante Anglaise,” which will appear at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s Sherwood Auditorium, Nov. 7-8.

After all, the goal of Alliance Francaise, a 50-year-old Paris-based organization with chapters worldwide, is to promote French culture and language.

What is surprising is that the San Diego chapter, which has a relatively small 200-plus membership (compared with more than 1,000 for Los Angeles and 2,000 for San Francisco) was chosen as the only California stop on the whirlwind 14-city tour by the Theatre Populaire de Lorraine, a French regional troupe endorsed by the French government.

The reason seems to be a combination of determination and timing. A representative from the Los Angeles Alliance chapter said the organization never heard of the French troupe, while the financial director at the San Francisco chapter, Shelby Pallotta, said they had commitments to other plays.

Fouque, who spoke through a translator, said her success in acquiring the play may also be due to the “risky” nature of what she calls “a huge financial venture.” The risk, however, was significantly reduced when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art agreed to co-sponsor the production, picking up half the cost of the theater rental and providing publicity and access to their membership, which numbers more than 3,000.

In conjunction with the play, which will be performed in French with English supertitles (translations projected above the stage), the theater troupe will show a documentary in French about Duras Nov. 7. And as part of a Duras festival, the La Jolla Museum will show three films that show off Duras’ talents as screenwriter, director and novelist. “Nathalie Granger,” “The Sailor from Gibraltar” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” will be shown Nov. 4, 11 and 13, respectively.

“L’Amante Anglaise” was a hit when it premiered in Paris in 1968 and received critical acclaim when it played in New York in 1971.

The true, grisly story that inspired the play began on Dec. 30, 1947, when some dismembered body parts of a man were found on a train. In the following weeks, more parts of this same man were found on other trains, all of which had one common station. The police tracked the murderer, who turned out to be the man’s wife. Claire Lannes, a housewife, had killed her husband after 20 years of marriage. She never gave an explanation for her deed. Lannes’ reticence so fascinated Duras that she wrote this play and two novels with the expressed purpose of “looking for” this woman.

In the process of her search, Duras changed the story, updating it to 1966 and changing the victim from a husband to a deaf-mute woman cousin, while keeping the husband as a character in the play. Duras once said in an interview that her reason for the alteration was, “I wanted to know who Pierre Lannes was and hear his testimony about his wife. So I took him out of his grave and gave him a voice, for once in his life.”

Fouque suggests that the change also reflects Duras’ fascination with “the dead end in which women find themselves with respect to their identity as a woman. In most of her work, Duras depicts a woman who kills another woman, thereby enacting the killing of the female identity in relationship to the other sex . . . It is significant that she made the victim a deaf mute and a woman (who cannot speak for herself).”

Duras is often described as a writer who is less interested in what people do than why they are the way they are. There are just three characters in the play--the husband, the wife and the interrogator. This small, intense circle is representative of Duras’ absorption in the dark side of human love, which is also reflected in her exploration of relationships in movies.

“Nathalie Granger,” written and directed by Duras, tells the story of a woman (played by Jeanne Moreau) and her relationship with a salesman (Gerard Depardieu) and her troubled child. In French, with English subtitles, “Nathalie” will be shown for the first time in San Diego Nov. 4. “The Sailor from Gibraltar,” in English, is adapted from a novel by Duras about a woman (Jeanne Moreau) roaming the seas, looking for the sailor she loves. “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” is her most famous screenplay. It is a dream-like tale of a French woman and a Japanese man whose romance is intertwined with the emotional ravages they endured years before and during World War II in France and Japan. It is in French with English subtitles.

Fouque hopes that the Duras festival, which includes receptions before the Saturday performance and after the Sunday performance, will spark interest not only in French culture but also in Duras.

“Duras is one of the greatest French writers, if not the greatest. She is also a hero. She never stops working,” said Fouque, reflecting on the woman who just published another novel this year. “She will probably keep working until she dies.”