Duras: La Pute de la Côte normande. Décor

Décor

Like her character, Suzanne, before a movie screen in Barrage contre le Pacifique, Duras often leads her reader or spectator into a theatrical setting of imagined love or dreams, a fictional décor which is established before being reduced to nothingness by its categorical unreality. Suzanne (the role Duras bases on her own memories) enjoys escaping through dreams, as in a movie theatre where she can be diverted from her goal of finding her brother. One afternoon, Suzanne enters this cinematic space of symbiotic empathy and becomes engulfed in the romantic tale being shown:

Le piano commença à jouer. La lumière s'éteignit. Suzanne se sentit désormais invisible, invincible et se mit à pleurer de bonheur. C'était l'oasis, la salle noire de l'après-midi, la nuit des solitaires, la nuit artificielle et démocratique, la grande nuit égalitaire du cinéma, plus vraie que la vraie nuit, plus ravissante, plus consolante que toutes les vraies nuits [...] (188).

More real than reality itself, Suzanne's world of the movie theatre resembles that of Duras' fiction. Duras describes the plot of Suzanne's film: a love story wherein a beautiful young woman has a number of unsuccessful adventures before finding love in Venice:

[Ils] s'enlacent. Il dit je vous aime. Elle dit je vous aime moi aussi. Le ciel sombre de l'attente s'éclaire d'un coup. Foudre d'un tel baiser. Gigantesque communion de la salle et de l'écran. On voudrait bien être à leur place. Ah! comme on le voudrait. (189)

The sheer plasticity in this display of sentiment is made obvious with the attention drawn to the performance space of the film projection. The feelings described maintain a quality of authenticity, nonetheless; their pure representation is immediately and universally understood. Like the wall Suzanne's mother will have built to hold back the Pacific, the movie screen divides the real world of the spectator from the potential and imaginary world of the film with which Suzanne has "communion." As with the sea wall, Duras dramatically establishes such barriers in both content and form before breaking down their assault upon difference. Thus she will both acknowledge and attack the wall she builds between human beings and that which distinguishes her real life from its textual signifiers.