Co-written with Jean-Marc Turine and her son, Jean Mascolo, Marguerite Duras’s last film Les Enfants is, in her words, “an endlessly desperate comedy whose subject has something to do with knowledge”, and was inspired by her reading of Ecclesiastes. The film’s protagonist is seven-year-old Ernesto (played by Axel Bogousslavsky who, at the time, was 38), who – much to the dismay of his traditional parents (Daniel Gélin and Tatiana Moukhine) – refuses to go to school “because they teach me things I don’t know”. Les Enfants is a philosophical fable that postulates childhood as a redress to societal failings, and celebrates resistance to a failing education system (one that May ’68 was, in the end, not able to rehabilitate). In Duras’s words: “Ernesto takes on the whole world: God, America, chemistry, knowledge, Marx and Hegel, the great mathematical powerhouses of the world. He has no popular ideas. He has no recipes, no principles, no morals. Ernesto is a hero.” 

Given her fondness and concern for the young, whom she often referred to as her “favourite audience”, it is surprising that Duras only made one film that included a significant child character. In an interview with Le Monde in 1967 about her first film, La Musica, she told the journalist: “I am unconditionally for the youth. The only princes are eighteen-year-old kids. After communists and Arabs, it is on them that bitterness and spite are focused. There is no trace of racism in the youth but, by contrast, a frenzied anti-militarism. They are imprudent and free. Let us just hope there is something left for them.” 

Les Enfants will be preceded by En rachâchant (1982) – Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s short adaptation of Duras’s children’s story Ah ! Ernesto (1971), which was the blueprint for the feature film – and Les Enfants et Noël (1965), a short documentary made for Dim Dam Dom that lingers on the glowing faces of children in a toy shop before Christmas, with Duras delivering a lyrical commentary in voice-over.

Programme 

En rachâchant, dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France 1982, 7 min. DCP
Les Enfants et Noël, dir. Claude Otzenberger, 1965, 6 min. DCP
Les Enfants, dir. Marguerite Duras, Jean Mascolo & Jean-Marc Turine, France 1984, 94 min. 35mm.