Like scènes à faire that should absolutely not be faites, there are inescapable questions which just should not be asked. With Détruire, Dit-Elle [Destroy, She Said], the fatal question is 'What's it all about?' It is reasonably easy to say what happens, up to a certain point…. In an extraordinary final scene [three characters] … plan a little visit, and listen to sounds and music, signalling the approach of some great, but welcome, perhaps even necessary, destructive force through the surrounding forest. Legitimate, obviously, to wonder who or what they are, what, if anything, they represent, what the forest, the famous view no one can ever find, the sounds in the final sequence, may signify. But fatal to expect any clear, unequivocal answer, and to make 'understanding' on this level a condition of accepting the film. It works—and powerfully, hauntingly—in quite another way: as a series of obscure rituals played out with the greatest seriousness by people who perhaps themselves do not even half grasp their significance, like the rather funny, rather sinister card game with no rules in which the three engage their victim (patient? initiate?). Very severely made, mostly in long-held, almost static shots, and impeccably acted, the film transfers to the screen with uncanny precision the special world of Marguerite Duras the writer: as in her novels, the outer form may be prose, but the inner life is pure poetry.
John Russell Taylor, "Festivals 69: London," in Sight and Sound (copyright © 1970 by The British Film Institute), Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter, 1969–70, p. 11.∗
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