It divided the critics when it was shown at the Cannes Festival although it obtained the surprising endorsement of Pauline Kael.Duras' cinema usually is light in plot and incident but here she takes her usual style to an extreme of minimalism.In a dark room the woman(Duras) and the man (Depardieu)talk for about eighty minutes. The woman talks about the film which she would have made,a film about a woman who hitches a ride with a truck driver ,coincidentally perhaps a film not unlike the minimalist "Je tu il elle" by another feminist director Chantal Akerman. Spliced between these conversations are shots of a truck driving through endless Parisian suburbs,a landscape which has a certain bleak industrial beauty.It becomes clear that Duras is both the writer/director and the woman who is hitching the ride while Depardieu is both the actor and the truck driver and between the two settings, the interior of the script and the exterior where it would be played out a film,struggling to find expression,is born in the imagination of the receptive viewer.
Review of The Truck
