It’s August 1960 – the grandes vacances – and, as her industrial village empties, Thérèse, an Italian immigrant, keeps the modest bar she runs open for the few who remain. When a heavily-signposted outsider, dressed in a large trench coat and hat, slowly traverses the village’s sunny square, Thérèse recoils: in him, she has recognised her former husband who was tortured and disappeared by the Gestapo at the end of the Second World War. But he has lost his memory. What ensues is a tender, impossible and one-sided love story – the speciality of the film’s writer, Marguerite Duras, who would only publish her account of the painful wait for, and return of, her husband, Robert Antelme, from Dachau, in 1985. The Long Absence’s screenplay is recognisably Durassian in its simplicity, repetition and romantic distortion of syntax, with dialogues like: D’aucune chose, vraiment, vous vous souvenez ? (Roughly: ‘Of nothing, really, you have no memory?’) 

Celebrated for his work as an editor on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, The Long Absence was Henri Colpi’s directorial debut, and, although it had received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, its condemnation by critics for its classicism in the context of the burgeoning Nouvelle Vague has led to a relative lack of appreciation.