Mr. Andesma's Afternoon

Author: Du
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: It's a bit like Ravel's ballet Boléro. Two tones of sound come and go, repeating endlessly, hesitating to speak, without beginning or end. It fully deserves to be called a deeply surreal poetic piece. – Reviewer Liu Enbo
I've always told Marguerite, "If you have a work I want to adapt into a film, it's The Afternoon of Mr. Andesma." She replied, "If I haven't filmed it, you can do it after I'm gone." This was a film she wanted to make. – Film Director Michel Portomar
Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was one of France's most renowned contemporary female novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers. Born on April 4, 1914, in C?n Th?, Vietnam, she was the daughter of elementary school teachers. She lost her father at the age of four, and the hardships of her childhood and her mother's tragic fate deeply influenced her life. At the age of 18, Duras moved to Paris to study, earning degrees in law and political science from the University of Paris. From 1935 to 1941, she worked as a secretary in the French Ministry of Immigration and married Robert Antelme. During World War II, Antelme was imprisoned in a concentration camp, later marrying Monique until his death in 1990.
Duras began her literary career with the novel The Shameful People (1943). Her works are not only rich in content and diverse in genre but also particularly focused on style, featuring a novel and unique style. Her early novel The Bay of Mexico (1950) vividly reflects the poverty of her childhood, and many of her other works are set in Indochina. Novels like The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952) are filled with cinematic imagery and colloquial dialogue, making them frequently adapted into films. Later works such as The Little Horse of Tadjoura (1953), The Music of the Spheres (1958), and The Obsession of Lord Loudon (1964) break traditional narrative patterns, blending fiction and reality, which led to her being considered part of the New Novel movement. However, her novels were merely stylistically similar to the New Novel in their emphasis on poetic and musical prose, yet distinct in their conceptual approach. She depicted social realities through the contrast of wealth and poverty and human desires, revealing society in a unique way.
Duras also achieved great success in theater and film. She published three collections of plays in 1965, 1968, and 1984, and in 1983, she won the French Academy's theater award. As a member of France's influential "Left Bank" film movement, she wrote outstanding screenplays such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960) and A Very Long Engagement (1961). Starting in 1965, she also took on directing, producing several acclaimed films annually, including The Song of India (1974), and earning numerous international awards.
With over 60 works, Duras has maintained a wide readership and audience. Her most famous work is the novel The Lover, published when she was 70 in 1984. This highly popular and exotic novel recounts her teenage with a Chinese lover in Indochina with remarkable candor, earning her the Goncourt Prize and being translated into numerous languages. It has sold over 2.5 million copies to date, making her one of the world's most celebrated French writers. Later, after learning of her lover's death, she revised The Lover into The Chinese Lover of the North (1991). Though everyone connected to her in the novel has passed away, her memories became bolder and more unreserved, with far more explicit descriptions of her lover's physicality than in The Lover, and even frank depictions of incest and homosexuality. However, she never revealed her lover's name, only referring to the girl as "she" and the lover as "the Chinese."