Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 2017
Memoir of War
Buy Memoir of War now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Memoir of War', also known as 'Memoir of Pain' , is a 2017 French drama film directed by Emmanuel Finkiel that stars Mlanie Thierry and Benot Magimel and is based on the 1985 autobiographical novel 'La Douleur' by Marguerite Duras. It was selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.
Plot
As Allied armies approach Paris in the summer of 1944, the occupying Germans arrest Robert, a writer and resister. His distraught wife Marguerite, also a writer and in the same resistance network, is approached by a French collaborator working for the Gestapo, who says he may be able to give information on her husband's fate. In return, he explicitly wants information on the influential resister Morland and implicitly would like an affair. After consulting Dionys, the head of the network who is also Marguerite's lover, she agrees to play along with the collaborator. They meet frequently, and he plies her with scarce food and wine, but she yields him no information or sex. He does however confirm that Robert has been deported to a concentration camp in Germany.
Once Paris is liberated and the Gestapo gone, the emphasis of the resisters switches to the fate of their captured members and support of their families. As Allied armies start liberating the concentration camps in the spring of 1945, information begins to trickle back on who is still alive and who is dead. Marguerite goes through agonies of waiting, torn between hope and despair, until it is confirmed that Robert is in Dachau and close to death. Dionys and Morland obtain a vehicle and papers to bring him back to Paris. When he is fit to work and travel, Marguerite takes him for a holiday in Italy but then divorces him.
Cast
* Mlanie Thierry as Marguerite Duras
* Emmanuel Bourdieu as Robert Antelme
* Benot Magimel as the fictional Pierre Rabier
* Benjamin Biolay as Dionys Mascolo
* Grgoire Leprince-Ringuet as Morland
Reception
Critical response
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 64% based on 33 reviews, with an average rating of 6.75/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "'Memoir of War' benefits from a magnetic performance by Mlanie Thierry, whose work is often enough to counter some of the film's fundamental flaws."See also
* List of submissions to the 91st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
* List of French submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
References
Buy Memoir of War now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 2017