Icarus Films announced this past week that novelist and playwright-turned-filmmaker Marguerite Duras’ Le Navire Night will be making its domestic DVD debut on Nov. 16.
A renowned novelist and playwright, Duras became a French New Wave screenwriter with a bang as her novel, “The Sea Wall,” was adapted for the screen by René Clément in 1958 as This Angry Age. She then followed with her script for director Alain Resnais’ 1959 film release of Hiroshima Mon Amour, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
After these early successes there was no stopping her, she began making films herself and scored a major triumph with India Song in 1975 and again with her final film as a director in 1985, Les Enfants … her plays and novels continue to be adapted to the screen by filmmakers to this day, some 15 years after her death in 1996 at the age of 81.
Icarus Films has scored a major find with Le Navire Night. As near as we can document, the film’s only domestic viewing was at the Lincoln Center in October of 2016. This means that the DVD release on Nov. 16 brings Duras’ film to domestic audiences for the first time.
Distribution rights were acquired during the summer from Les Films du Lendemain, which also includes writer/director Benoît Jacquot’s recent film adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ 1984 stage play, Suzanna Andler. The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg (film festivals screenings … and an Oct. 08 arthouse run from Icarus, so we can expect to see this on DVD during the first quarter of 2022).
As to Le Navire Night, a love story plays out with Dominique Sanda (A Gentle Woman, The Conformist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Steppenwolf, etc.) and Mathieu Carrière — The House of the Bories, Born for Hell) as “lovers” who never meet. She is dying of leukemia and does not venture out.
What is unique about the relationship is that the phone conversations take place over a telephone network that was developed during the German occupation of Paris. It is a bittersweet tale, made all the more so by the cinematography of the late Pierre Lhomme (six-times nominated for César Awards, with wins for Cyrano de Bergerac and Camille Claudel). You would be hard-pressed to find more haunting images of deserted Parisian streets at night in either film, paintings or photographs.
Bonus features include Dominique Auvray’s 2002 feature-length documentary titled Marguerite as She Was. Le Navire Night is presented in French with English subtitles.
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