Benoit Jacquot's _Suzanna Andler_ is a minor key
masterclass in filmmaking. Although the cast is spare --
each scene has two characters, unless it has one -- the
camera is a constant dynamic companion, closing in, pulling
out, observing, judging. On the minimalist set the glitter
in Andler's embroidered shirt, the blue twirl of cigaratte
smoke become startling special effects. The main setting is
dominated by the wide balcony overlooking the Mediterranean,
the sea separating two strips of land at the edges of
Jacquot's widescreen composition, as if to emphasize that,
even when actors share the frame, they are oceans apart.
Except for a few chords of medieval music, ambient noise
and the sound of the sea, punctuate the characters' dialogues.
Towards dusk, the quasi-natural lighting is reminiscent
of that of high-contrast black-and-white films, with the
camera swirling around the characters, the lens's
shallow focus now favoring the person in the house, now
illuminating the one outside. Decorating the dining hall
of the voluminous villa are modernist landscape paintings,
child-like and jarring in a film where innocence goes to
die.

Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the despondent Suzanna. Her
boyish haircut and miniskirt channel Delphine Seyrig, even
if Seyrig plays the "unknown woman" instead of the lead in
_Baxter, Vera Baxter_, Marguerite Duras' own adaptation of
the same play. You can feel the winter chill in the fur
Gainsbourg wears. Her Suzanna is the wife of rich financier
Jean, ostensibly sent to finalize the rental of the villa
as summer vacation home. In reality it seems a ploy to
push her into the arms of her lover Michel (Niels Schneider),
a small-time writer. The husband, who only materializes
as a disembodied voice, has been having affairs and neglecting
her since her 9-year old was born. His minions are everywhere
though, including the real-estate agent and Suzanna's
"friend" Monique, one of Jean's numerous former mistresses.
She is played by Jacquot's frequent muse Julia Roy, as if to
multiply the sense of complicity.

Downhill from the balcony is a stone-rimmed seashore, where
Suzanna spies on two unknown women's conversation. Or so
she tells Michel. Perhaps she is lying -- she herself and
Monique are those conversationalists, shown sharing intimate,
possibly false, details of their respective affairs in one
of the film's earlier long acts. Suzanna lies a great deal,
to herself and others, even as everyone hides things from
her. She is incredibly passive, seemingly watching her
life unfold from the outside, yet for all that, unable
to see very much.

The entire film takes place in these two locations, and
unfold chronologically in four acts from hung-over mid
morning to elegiac sundown. I haven't read the play (I
doubt it is available in translation, even though it was
once staged in New York) but the writing seems pure Duras.
Both husband and lover whisper her name like an incantation;
the ghostly litany of exotic places she has visited (Paris,
Cannes, Bordeaux) becomes a substitute for having lived a
real life. In the last act she reunites with her inconstant
lover, and Gainsbourg finally lets down her guard and her
mask. Suzanna loves Michel's cruelty, his bad-boy vibe,
obsession with fast car and drinking. If the relationship
seems a car-wreck waiting to happen, their embrace at the
film's end at last, for an instance, obliterates the gulf
between human beings Jacquot's precise camera work has
insinuated since the beginning of the film. _Suzanne is
a portrait of an tawdry affair from an era as bygone and
quaint as the corded telephones in the film, but its emotions
and personal demons are universal. To paraphrase Alice
Diop pontificating on another Duras screenplay, Jacquot's
formalist craft and Gainsbourg's nuanced acting translate
Suzanna's shame into a state of grace.