Destroy, She Said

Based on the letters of a fictitious poetess to her lover. Duras reads extracts from these letters, as the film shows a boat journey down the Seine, past familiar bridges and landmarks. – BFI

The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

Traces a slow advance through Paris in the early hours of the morning. The deserted boulevards of Paris are punctuated by interspersed groups of dark-skinned workers, stray prostitutes and vagabonds.

A sexually repressed school teacher releases her pent up passions in a series of shocking crimes.

A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.

Stages a double persona on a music of Monteverdi (Ariadne’s lamento interpreted by Janet Baker).

Therese, a café owner, mourns the mysterious disappearance of her husband sixteen years earlier. A tramp arrives in the town and she believes him to be her husband. But he is suffering from amnesia and she tries to bring back his memory of earlier times.

Le Navire Night is a story of love and desire sustained and nourished through sound waves. The film’s voice-over tells the story of a woman, terminally ill with leukemia, living in isolation at her wealthy father's villa, and a man working night shifts at a telephone company. They have never met in person.

In this most talky and personal of films, director Marguerite Duras and actor Gerard Depardieu do an on-camera read-through of a movie script. Occasionally, the director comments about the characters or their motivations, and sometimes the actor does. That's all -- there is no action, there are no location shots, no one pretends to be anything else. The script itself tells about an encounter between a blank-slate of a woman hitchhiker, and a communist truck driver. As the reading progresses, Duras comments bitterly about the failed ideals of communism and the glorious revolution that will probably never happen.

Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.

Anne Desbarèdes is a young woman who is married to a wealthy businessman and lives a monotonous existence in the small commune town of Blaye. After indirectly witnessing a murder in a café, she returns to the scene of the crime the next day and meets Chauvin, who informs her in more detail about the events that took place. Mentally unbalanced, Anne begins to believe that Chauvin intends to kill her.

On images of the Tuileries Gardens, Marguerite Duras recalls Césarée, an ancient destroyed city.

With little or no embellishment, filmmaker Marguerite Duras offers a simple, often wordless chronicle of a woman's day. She and her friend are seen doing yard work, talking about their families and receiving the occasional visitor. The brightest spot in the day is when a washing machine salesman comes to call.

In the last days of the Nazi-occupied France, writer Marguerite Duras awaits the return of her husband, Robert Antelme, arrested for being a Resistance fighter and then deported, while she maintains a tense relationship with her ambiguous lover and a dangerous game with a French collaborationist. Even when the Liberation arrives, she must still endure the unbearable pain of waiting.

Drama of an unmarried mother who regrets having had her child fostered and fights its foster parents to have it restored to her.

In an empty villa, Vera Baxter sits and contemplates her life, as she recounts to a woman who was drawn to the villa when she heard the name Vera Baxter pronounced. Vera tells her about her no-good husband, who has been using her to keep his failing business afloat, up to her present love affair.