Vous ne désirez que moi
A superfan dates his idol in this intimate, theatrical piece of intellectual French cinema.
French director Claire Simon, a prolific maker of fiction and documentary films, unites the two forms in her surprising latest, a precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa.
Dramatized as a pair of dialogues based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (played on screen by Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos, an expert interrogator and a mesmerizing listener), Simon’s film underlines the sexual imbalances and power plays that defined their fraught love life. if you accept this as an inherently talky, theatrical piece, it offers rewarding insights into both characters, as well as a complex relationship that could be labelled both toxic and abusive.
