The Lorry

Marguerite Duras / France / 1977 / Czech Premiere / 76 min.

synopsis

Short sentences avoid description. Marguerite Duras reads aloud and Gérard Depardieu is her truck driver. Shots of the two protagonists sitting at a table alternate with shots of the truck cab, where no one is sitting. Occasionally we see a passing landscape. As time passes and it slowly gets darker, Duras and Depardieu begin casually talking about cigarettes… The Truck is a brilliant piece of cinema on how to work intuitively with time, length, pause, text, voice and music. The Truck is often described as a portrait film, here a metaphor for a road that doesn't stumble.

biography

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996), the writer, playwright, screenwriter, and eventually director entered the world of film in the second half of the 1950s. Initially, she adapted her own works or wrote original scripts. Her independent film directing work begins in the 1970s. She was a completely original artist who brought modernism to cinema.