VietNam Life Style: Duras

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Cesar award winner to perform in Ha Noi

Simple setting: French actress Dominique Blanc will perform in French in The War: A Memoir (La Douleur) with Vietnamese subtitle on Thursday at Ha Noi Opera House. She has received best actress award for her part in La Douleur during the 24th Molieres theatre award ceremony last year. – Photo courtesy of French Cultural Centre

HA NOI — Actress Dominique Blanc will perform her one-woman theatrical odyssey La Douleur (The War: A Memoir) at the Ha Noi Opera House on Thursday night.

Directed by Patrice Chereau, the drama won Dominique a Moliere prize for best theatrical actress last year.

Born in 1956 in Lyon, Blanc trained at the French Drama School. She is one of France's most critically acclaimed actresses, with four Cesar Awards (the French Oscars) already under her belt.

Blanc met director Patrice Chereau while working on a production of Peer Gynt in 1981, and the pair have worked together on several successful productions since.

In 1989, Blanc won her first Cesar for her supporting role in May Fools. She also received Cesars for her supporting roles in Indochina in 1992 and Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train in 1998, while also winning best actress in 2000 for Stand-by. She also won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress in L'Autre at the 65th Venice Film Festival in 2008.

In The War: A Memoir, based on the diary of writer Marguerite Duras, Blanc adds a unique resonance to Duras's script. Her performance style is simple, yet intense.

Blanc will perform in French for one night only at the Ha Noi Opera House on Thursday at 8pm.

Born in 1914 in Gia Dinh, near Sai Gon, Viet Nam, after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony, Marguerite Duras was the author of many novels, plays, films, essays and short fiction, including her best-selling, apparently autobiographical work L'Amant (The Lover) in 1984.

The book won the Goncourt prize in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other stories: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri, was released to great success in 1992.

During World War II, Duras spent a long time waiting for her husband's return from a concentration camp. She wrote a diary as a testimony of her own suffering.

The War: A Memoir is a diary that reflects a punishing absence, a threatfull waiting, despair, the shame of being alive while waiting for a loved one to survive unspeakable horrors.

Despite her success as a writer, Duras's adult life was also marked by personal challenges, including a recurring struggle with alcoholism. Duras died of throat cancer in Paris, aged 81. — VNS

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Home at center of steamy novel now a tourist site

A visitor is seen leaving the house of Huynh Thuy Le, the leading character in the French novel and movie "L'Amant"(The Lover), written by Marguerite Duras, in the town of Sadec, Vietnam's southern province of Dong Thap.

Photo: AFP

For years, the home of the main male character in French writer Marguerite Duras' steamy novel "The Lover" was closed to the public in Vietnam.

Now it is recognized as a national historic site, and is open to tourists.

The purportedly autobiographical novel, published in 1984, tells the story of a teenage French girl's affair with her wealthy Chinese lover in colonial Indochina.

The lover's family home was in the Mekong Delta town of Sadec, according to the best-selling novel, which was translated into numerous languages including Vietnamese.

A 1992 film version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Tony Leung, proved more popular than the novel in Vietnam, even though the more erotic scenes were censored.

In Sadec, the walls of the house proudly display photos from the film, as well as of the woman who in real life ultimately became the wife of the man known as the lover, Huynh Thuy Le.

Their children are also pictured. A tour guide says the children went to live in France and the United States shortly before the Vietnam War ended.

With the communist victory and Vietnam's reunification in 1975, the house became a police station, which it remained at the time of filming "The Lover".

It could not be featured in the movie, and photographs were forbidden.

Twenty years after Vietnam began its "Doi Moi" policy of opening up to the world and embracing a market economy in 1986, the home was named a "cultural vestige".

Its special status was further enshrined this year when authorities declared it a national historic site. Now, tourists are even allowed to sleep in the house.

The original facade was a mixture of Chinese and French styles, a single-storey home with outbuildings and spacious grounds. Much of that land has now been eaten up by housing in the town southwest of Ho Chi Minh City, in Dong Thap province.

But the main building remains, and includes a large wooden altar which honored the family's Chinese ancestors, just inside the entrance.

Another feature is a vast low table encrusted with mother-of-pearl and tiles from France.

Le Hong Sam, a Duras translator, welcomed classification of the home as a historic site, calling it a recognition of the author.

But Duras herself was not able to enter before she left Vietnam forever in 1932. Le Thi Thanh Tuyen, a guide at the attraction, says the lover's father did not approve of Duras' presence.

"Marguerite Duras never came" to the house, she says.

VietNam Life Style