Nathalie Granger

Duras' early feature gains much in atmosphere from the house where it was shot, the author's own home outside Paris (where, among other things, she wrote Hiroshima, Mon Amour with Resnais). It's the setting for a typically indefinable 'narrative' bringing together the brooding presence of two women, Moreau and Bosé, a sense of crisis surrounding daughter Nathalie's abandonment of her piano lessons and violent conduct at school, and a rather daffy tyro turn from Depardieu as a flailing washing machine salesman. The effect is as diffuse as it is compelling, a celluloid equivalent of atonal music or free verse, but Duras' avowedly instinctive approach pays dividends for the patient viewer.