Her: Nothing is more finished than this… of all finished things.
Him: And if we were dead… Including death, do you think?
 
In 1966, Marguerite Duras – already established as a prolific writer, but looking for an escape from the world of publishing – made her debut as a filmmaker with La Musica, based on a short play she had written a year earlier. Co-directed with Paul Seban – with whom she had made television – La Musica is a psychological three-hander that delicately dissects love after separation.
 
The paths of two women and a man cross in a provincial town in the North of France. A young American woman (Julie Dassin, who, for Duras, possessed “a kind of wildness combined with a certain purity”) accosts the man (Robert Hossein) in a café. She is ostensibly on holiday, though the true reasons behind her stay are less clear. They spend the afternoon together. He is there to formalise his divorce from a woman (the ever-marvellous Delphine Seyrig), in the town in which they had once lived. In an empty hotel, the couple has a final conversation: with corridors, rooms and lobbies providing containers for their reminiscences, confessions, and renewed feelings. With exquisite staging and camerawork by Sacha Vierny, who had worked on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, this screening of La Musica is a New Wave-adjacent primer to Duras’s filmic universe.

Love affairs can end in the space of an hour, marriages (La Musica) in the space of three years. And, within these endless ends, there is space for endless revival. —Marguerite Duras