Memoir of War

Memoir of War (La Douleur, 2017) is a French wartime drama from Emmanuel Finkiel that you can watch online on iFILM. It is summer 1944, the occupation has not yet broken, and writer Marguerite Duras is waiting. Her husband, a Resistance member, has been arrested and shipped to a German camp.

Desperate for any scrap of news, Duras strikes up a perilous acquaintance with Pierre Rabier, a Frenchman working for the Gestapo. Every meeting is a tightrope: one wrong word and she, or the network around her, could vanish. Mélanie Thierry plays Duras; Benoît Magimel is the chillingly polite collaborator. Then liberation finally comes — and the real agony begins, the hollow stretch of days when she still does not know whether Robert is alive.

Adapted from Duras's own autobiographical writing, the film lives inside her head rather than in any action. It tracks numbness, dread and the strange guilt of the one left behind. If you favour slow, literary cinema about the war fought in waiting rooms instead of trenches, this one rewards your patience. Stream Memoir of War (2017) online on iFILM.