An old woman, a mother, arrives in Paris from the end of the world, from a former colony very far away, to see her son before she dies. This son, this old son—lazy, a gambler, a thief—is his mother’s favourite. The mother is already very old, almost senile, bulimic, drivelling. She is now on the precipice of death. But the love she has for her son has survived the decline of her rational faculties, of her life.

The film is also about the relationship that forms between the mother and Marcelle, a young woman who lives with her son. The film is about the deep complicity—the love, even—that blossoms between an old woman with a spotless past and a young whore who has been raised on welfare, brought up by the state. 

Duras’s narratively most conventional film is also her most personal, and its painful autobiographical components might explain the 22-year gap between writing the source novel and its translation onto the screen. It is the fictionalised account of Duras’s mother – a poor French woman who went to teach in Indochina, where she had three children and experienced financial ruin – who returns to Paris for the first time in ten years, to visit her favourite son (Duras’s elder brother, whose violent nature she documented across several novels). It is a film about the waning of the French colonies; women across generational divides (Marcelle, a “young whore”, played by a charmingly graceless Bulle Ogier, strikes up an unlikely friendship with the mother); and imperfect motherhood.