Auditel

In this most talky and personal of films, director Marguerite Duras and actor Gerard Depardieu do an on-camera read-through of a movie script. Occasionally, the director comments about the characters or their motivations, and sometimes the actor does. That's all -- there is no action, there are no location shots, no one pretends to be anything else. The script itself tells about an encounter between a blank-slate of a woman hitchhiker, and a communist truck driver. As the reading progresses, Duras comments bitterly about the failed ideals of communism and the glorious revolution that will probably never happen.

In this heady, phantasmagoric fairy tale, a young girl comes face to face with a friendly dragon and a magnanimous witch. Upon the witch granting the girl’s wish to become a young woman, this surrealist chronicle follows the precocious Camélia on a series of quests in pursuit of love.