The ostensible subject of Le Camion is a film-maker (played by Mme. Duras herself) going over the script of a film she wants to make with the other leading player….
[The] device of discussing an unmade film is only a device; it is not the real subject of the film. True enough, for much of the time we do get Duras reading lines to [Gérard] Depardieu, and the actor asking questions about the characters each would be playing (this is a film in the conditional tense). Who would she be, asks Depardieu of the woman he, as truck-driver, would give a lift to. Declassée, says Duras; that's all one can say about her. But of course there is much more to be said, because this woman is a number of women. To begin with, she is the heroine of Hiroshima, mon Amour grown old…. Depardieu is made to suggest that the woman has perhaps escaped from a local lunatic asylum. Duras neither confirms nor denies the accusation. Perhaps she is on the way to the christening of her nephew Abraham, whose family lives in an impossible spot to which there is only one bus a day. She talks once or twice about her childhood—far, far away from France. 'There was a river.' The Mekong, perhaps? We are never told, but the woman could be the young heroine of [René Clément's] Barrage contre le Pacifique, she could also be Anne-Marie Stretter, Lol V. Stein. She is almost certainly the Asian beggar woman from India Song. But she is probably also Jewish.
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