"What to do with the solitude I experienced in this house? That’s how it started, like a joke. Write, perhaps."

There are, as we know, "house-films", like some of the movies by Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jacques Doillon, or Manoel de Oliveira’s posthumous film. In its own way, Écrire is one of these films. In it, Benoît Jacquot asks Marguerite Duras about her relationship with the very place she writes, this house in Neauphle-le-Château so familiar to her readers, which Caroline Champetier films so gorgeously here. Intrinsically linked to the "essential solitude" in which and with which Duras wrote some of her books, and where she also shot perhaps her most beautiful films, this almost organic relationship to the house is particularly tangible in Nathalie Granger and The Lorry. Like the latter, "Écrire" also became a book, just as beautiful as the film.

Fabien David
Programmer at Cinéma Le Bourguet in Forcalquier

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