French actress’ long-delayed visit
Print 
Dominique Blanc, who won a Cesar for playing Yvette in the well-known 1992 French movie about Vietnam, never thought she would set foot on Vietnam one day.
It wasn’t in Vietnam but Malaysia where Indochine was shot. Last Thursday, however, the talented French actress saw for herself the country that she had wanted so much to see.
Blanc was here to perform La douleur (War: A Memoir), a play based on a novel of the same name written by Marguerite Duras, who penned the famous novel L’amant (The Lover), which like Indochine is also set in Vietnam.
Blanc shared with Tuoi Tre her thoughts about La douleur, Duras and acting.
Marguerite Duras said her novel was a diary about war written from the perspective of a woman. In it, she turned her own pain of waiting for her husband who was imprisoned in a concentration camp and fear of never seeing him again into polemics. Your role is a lonely one, your co-actors are a set of furniture, and you have won a Molière award for it. How did you manage?
I wasn’t trained as an actor, so my natural heart-felt acting became my asset. Duras was a small woman, only 1,6m tall and her female characters all resembled her. During the German occupation, she gave birth but the baby died prematurely, and her husband was captured. So she used her own story in the novel.
How to play a woman who is desperately waiting for her loved ones? My acting was simple but powerful. I raised my hands high to express my bitterness and anger against war crimes. Perhaps because of my somewhat hoarse voice, every sentence I spoke cut through the audience’s mind like a machine.
I imagined the chairs and table were my co-actors and tried to express every word describing the character in the novel to revive it. If you felt “hurt” watching this play, perhaps it is because you felt the power of Duras’s language.
The sensibility to feel the “pain of war” seems harder to find among audiences and actors now. So what has drawn you to the tragedies in Duras’s works?
- There is an often-repeated sentence in this play: “Pain is one of the most important parts of my life.” I can play this role fully only because I have acting experience and can feel the pains of life that Duras names. Duras was fatherless, taught by her mother, and saw her small plantation submerge under the sea and spent her childhood in poverty.
It is undeniable that her family tragedies and Vietnam, where she was born, are present in too many of her works, especially in Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950). I’m always haunted by its widow, Dufresne, who struggles to build walls to protect her rice field against sea storms.
Besides reading Duras’s works, I have read many materials about her life and the historical contexts surrounding her at each period of her career. If you research about her like me, you’ll discover that during WWII, after everyone had left Paris, she still stayed on the streets to sell the Communist Party’s newspapers.
A photo showing Duras selling newspapers is often talked about in France. There, it isn’t difficult to remind people of war. Vietnam and Duras for instance have become inextricably connected.
| Besides Indochine, Blanc won a Cesar for Best actress in 2000 for Stand-by and two for Best actress in a supporting role in 1990 for Milou en mai and in 1998 for Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train. She has also been nominated four more times and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 65th Venice Film Festival in 2008. |
