Every night in Paris, hundreds of men and women use the anonymity of unused telephone lines that date from the German occupation to talk to one another, to love one another.

These people, these survivors of the shipwreck of love, of desire, are dying to love, to leave the abyss of solitude. These people who cry out at night into the abyss make plans to meet. These meetings never come to fruition. It is enough that they are made. Nobody ever meets. It is this cry flung out into the abyss, this scream, that triggers the release of pleasure.

Or perhaps it is the other scream that has this effect: the response.

Somebody cries out. Another responds that they have heard this scream. It is a black orgasm. Without any form of physical contact. Without a face. Eyes closed. Just a voice. The text of the voices is spoken, the eyes of the speaker are closed. 

In another of Duras's experiments with wresting sound from image, the through-line of Le Navire Night is a story of love and desire sustained and nourished through sound waves. The film’s voice-over tells the story of a woman, terminally ill with leukemia, living in isolation at her wealthy father's villa, and a man working night shifts at a telephone company. They have never met in person. For a period, they connected over unused phone lines: remnants of the German occupation of Paris. Now they have lost contact altogether. This story is illustrated by pans and travelling shots of an empty Paris – its touristscapes and an overgrown cemetery – and three actors (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, Mathieu Carrière) as they prepare to shoot a film (this film?). 

According to Duras, Le Navire Night’s love story belonged to her friend, J.M.: a story that was legendary among their friends, and which obsessed Duras (unsurprisingly, given its vein of thwarted and insurmountable desire), who initially published its written record in the periodical Minuit. But its filmic adaptation proved impossible for Duras, and Le Navire Night is the product of her near-abandonment of the project. From Duras’s documentation of the shoot: “I told [the crew] we were going to abandon the shooting script and instead shoot the disaster of the film. That, during the day, we would shoot the set and the actors being made up. And so we did. Little by little the film emerged from death. [...] I found the material to cover the screen while the sound and the story flowed. I discovered that it was possible to achieve a film derived from Le Navire Night that would bear witness to the story even more (but to an incalculable degree) than the so-called Navire Night film I had been trying to uncover for months. We put the camera the wrong way around and filmed what came towards it: the night, air, spotlights, roads; faces, too.”