FESTIVALS:
1961 Cannes
1963 Valladolid
The title reflects the fate of this too-little-known film which won the Grand Prize at Cannes and the prestigious Pris Louis Delluc. Scripted by Marguerite Duras, it was directed by Henri Colpi, the esteemed film editor best known for his work with Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour). Colpi’s forte as editor is in giving the matrix of memory and desire an emotional register through form. The setting here is a bleak Parisian suburb in August, when anyone who is anyone has left for les vacances; our story concerns those who stay. The proprietress (Alida Valli) of a working-class bar is stunned when a tramp (Georges Wilson) walks in who is the image of her husband, deported and presumably killed by the Germans sixteen years earlier. The kind, gentlemanly stranger has lost his memory, clearly damaged by the war himself; he is a tabula rasa onto which she paints her longing.
– Pacific Film Archive.
The simplicity of The Long Absence which, in France, was called Une Aussi Longue Absence and is from a screenplay by the Marguerite Duras who wrote Hiroshima, Mon Amour, is perhaps the most striking aspect of it. It is uncomplicated and spare almost to the point of appearing shallow – on the surface, that is. It presents nothing more sophisticated than the drama of a woman in a French town who is suddenly knocked off her props by the appearance of a shabby, amnesia-suffering tramp who she joyously thinks is her husband, missing since World War II. And it does nothing more than trace the eager but tensely cautious and gentle steps by which she tries to confirm her strong suspicions and unlock the sealed chambers of the man’s mind. That’s all.
It is an obvious story, no more devious and difficult than that – no involved psychological gymnastics, no flashbacks, no cinematic tricks. Yet within its very simple exposition with beautifully formed and ordered scenes, a brilliant performance by Alida Valli and exquisite photography, it encompasses a world of feeling and drama inside a woman’s heart and a whole range of searing intimations of what might have happened during the war. Let’s say that something of the same sort of aching, wistful longing for lost love that ran through Miss Duras’s more complex Hiroshima, Mon Amour trails like the sound of distant violins through this exquisite film.
It begins when the still handsome matron, proprietor of a working-men’s cafe, first sees the reminiscent stranger stalk hauntingly past her door. It heightens when she tries to find him in the dusk along the bank of the Seine, seeks him again and pursues him in the summer dawn, gets him to come to her cafe, where she plays operatic airs for him and has relatives of her husband to watch him secretly and speak his name. And it comes to a quiet, heart-tearing climax as she sits patiently with him listening to music from the juke box and as she waltzes slowly in his arms.
One might remark that it is obvious, a bit sentimental, and that it drags – that it stays pretty much in the area of a single situation and mood. It does, but the simple contemplative and cumulative nature of the urge that seizes and swells within the bosom of the woman as she trembles toward a love that is nothing but memory or illusion is best evoked in just this way. Miss Valli is so right for the role. She is beautiful, dignified, serene, yet within her matronly presence one feels longing, impatience and desire. And Mr. Colpi has got her to glisten so rapturously when she feels she is achieving an awareness that it touches the heart with sad, sweet pain.
Georges Wilson is also excellent, as the lonely, laconic tramp in whom there is an impressive gentleness and serenity. He carries himself with a bearing that makes the suspicion plausible. And the few fleeting lights of recollection that he manages to bring into his face at the moments of highest expectation are glints of drama at its best. Mr. Colpi and his director of photography, Marcel Weiss, merit supreme admiration for the pictorial poetry in this film, and credit for a slender, subtle, sensitive music score goes to Georges Delerue. And, thank Heaven, everybody had the sense and restraint to bring the film to the sort of meaningful conclusion that its delicate theme deserves. It draws an appropriate curtain around an intimate experience of a woman’s heart. Incidentally, the dialogue is spoken with such gratifying clarity, and the English subtitles that translate it are so suitable and well placed, that students of French should find this a particularly good film to attend.
– Bosley Crowther, 16 November 1962, The New York Times.
RESTORATION:
Restoration has done wonders: no parasites, a stable image that respects all the shades of the photo or depth of field. A light grain, deep blacks, bright whites, really a beautiful work. The Mono track offers a sound free of any slag, clear, slightly narrow but, in this film where music and silence play a big role, the fact that some dialogues are somewhat sacrificed is not very embarrassing.
– adapted from François Bonini, avoir-alire.com, 2 August 2021 (translated from the French).
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