In "The Truck," the director and novelist Marguerite Duras plays a woman whose lips curl into a joyless, knowing half-smile every time she makes mention of despair. Her film should appeal most strongly to those viewers who are similarly attuned to the romantic possibilities of gloom. However, even those who have little patience for Miss Duras's preciousness may find her work as haunting and determinedly self-possessed as it is quietly infuriating….

"The Truck" is full of exasperatingly banal interchanges, which are in no way improved or illuminated by Miss Duras's admission of her character's banality. It is also rather coyly self-pitying, because Miss Duras and her character seem to overlap, and the character is at times made to seem pathetic.

But the scenes of the truck take on an eerie grandeur after a while, and Miss Duras's disdain for her audience's expectations becomes perversely transfixing. It's a pity...