'I could speak for hours about this house, about this garden' are the first words of Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras: a beautiful documentary portrait of the writer-filmmaker, originally made for French television, in which her intimate lieux (places) provide the background and starting point for wide-ranging and wild philosophical discussions on topics such as women (sometimes as witches, sometimes as mothers, sometimes as her characters), and the differences between writing and filmmaking. Although “discussions” might not be the right term, since one of the skills which Michelle Porte – whose friendship with Duras began on the set of her first film, La Musica – brings to the art of documentary making is as a listener. The palpable understanding and shared frame of reference between the two women, encourages Duras (not that she tended to need much encouragement) in formulating, and elaborating on, some of her best aphorisms: 

‘It is only women who inhabit places, not men.’
‘The closest thing I've ever seen to an assassination is childbirth.’
‘The horror of the family is something that is deeply ingrained in every house.’
 
Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras is a film in two parts: in the first, we find her in her Neauphle-le-Château home – which had already defined Nathalie Granger (“What I see in Nathalie Granger before anything else, before the film, is the house,” Duras says in Les Lieux) – sitting at the table at which she and Gérard Depardieu would read the script to Le Camion (1978). In the second – by far the more personal – we see her in her apartment in the Hôtel des Roches Noires – a nineteenth-century mansion by the sea in Trouville that had once been Proust’s preferred holiday spot – the location for La Femme du Gange (1974) and for two of her most radical “late stage” films, Agatha et les lectures illimitées and L’Homme Atlantique (both 1981). And, in these spaces, between speech, there are beautiful moments of respite: Duras at the window, smoking; walking along the Normandy coast that would define much of her work; and playing a few notes on the piano which she insists, coquettishly, she can’t play.