[Marguerite Duras's Destroy, She Said is an abomination.] Hitherto the author was content to write bad novels or bad scripts for other directors; here for the second time she combined writing and directing, and the result seems not so much bad doubled as bad cubed.
Two men and two women, in weirdly posed, arbitrary groupings, make endless, arcanely opaque statements past one another. It is supposed to take place in a hotel, but it is obviously someone's country house and backyard. You never see anyone else (though you hear the sounds of a ghost tennis game—Son of Blow Up?), except for the husband of one of the women who shows up at the end of the film to be pounced on by the other four; there is no action, minimal movement, and only that somnambulistic dialogue which, Mlle Duras proudly affirms, is interchangeable. In the end, there is the obligatory Bach fugue, by now indispensable to true avant-garde films, which is heard in a huge crescendo signifying, according to the author, the coming of the Revolution. It could as easily signify the rising birth rate or the devaluation of the franc. (pp. 386-87)
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