The Truck

Initially conceived as the story of an older woman hitching a ride with a trucker, bemoaning the demise of the revolution and the impoverished state of society (“the world has gone to rack and ruin”), Le Camion (“The Truck”) is the film that ensued when Duras couldn’t find a suitable actress for the lead. Instead, she and Gérard Depardieu sit at a table and read from the script, discussing the film that might have been, with periodic cutaways to a truck driving along the highway at night. Celebrated by figures as disparate as Pauline Kael and John Waters, Le Camion was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and hailed by Jonathan Rosenbaum as “one of Marguerite Duras’s most radically minimalist features . . . [also] one of her best, as well as one of her most accessible.”