I Want to Talk About Duras

The two-hander dialogue is perhaps the hardest form to pull off in film – there’s always the risk of viewers feeling that they’re not really seeing full-blown cinema – but Claire Simon rises magnificently to the challenge in I Want to Talk About Duras. At once literary biography and in-depth portraiture, achieving the concentrated intensity of a psychoanalysis session, Simon’s film studies the late Yann Andréa, who was the partner of the writer and film-maker Marguerite Duras. Based on Andréa’s interviews with journalist Michèle Manceaux, Simon’s film is the quintessence of intimate cinema, and a vehicle for superb minor-key acting from Swann Arlaud and Emmanuelle Devos.

Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily