SLIFF 2018 Review – MEMOIR OF WAR

MEMOIR OF WAR screens Sunday Nov. 4th at 12pm at The Plaza Frontenac as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Ticket info can be found HERE

Review by Stephen Tronicek

What happens to you when you must wait for a possibly dead loved one to return? By the end of the wait, will you still be the same person? Will they? Will your lives just start up again or will enough have changed in the time waited that it is impossible to reconcile the years past? These are the questions that Emmanuel Finkel’s Memoir of War grapples with, and not always in an entertaining way. At 2 hours Finkel’s work is an excruciating wait, a depressive wail, a drab slow walk to the finish…but it has to be. The everyday movement of the world around us, the everyday movement of ourselves is difficult, especially when we are in anticipation of an event that will give us back our joy.

Based off of Marguerite Dura’s “The War: A Memoir,” Memoir of a War often feels unmoored from the conventions of traditional storytelling. Marguerite (Melanie Thierry) must wait for her husband to return after he is taken by the Nazis, and as time goes on and on the wait wedges her further and further from other people. This means that characters can’t necessarily develop within the narrative traditionally. They exist, drifting in an out of Margurite’s life in a way that is not always narratively satisfying but perfectly captures the inner distance growing out of Marguerite’s grief.

Emmanuel Finkel’s direction may not be as precise as it needs to be, but it deceptively displays the depths Marguerite’s disparity. The camera often reflects this keeping the world blurry around Marguerite who we follow very closely as she deliberately makes it through her time alone. Thierry is also beyond excellent and spends much of the film alone with herself in the frame. That means we have to care about her for long periods of time of doing nothing. In the hands of a bad director and even a good actor, this can become a nightmare (just ask The Little Stranger from earlier this year), but Finkel and Thierry are more than up to the task. Both their work, along with the nontraditional structure of characters creates a weird ennui that however uncomfortable, is extremely potent.

Memoirs of War breaks the template of WWII biopics by not being uplifting but it benefits from being just that. As the story comes to a close, the audience isn’t sure whether or not the relationship at the center of the piece will survive but we know that it meant something, even if that something was unbearable grief and suffering.