The Long Absence

Puteaux, on the edge of Paris. Thérèse runs a small café there. Her husband was taken away during the war and never came back. One day she notices a vagrant passing the café; he looks like him, he looks exactly like him. She follows him. The man does not remember who he is, can say nothing about his past, and does not recognise anything she tells him. Thérèse tries to bring it back: music, a name, an old habit. The film gives no answer; what it shows is the way she asks for one. Henri Colpi directs the French film; ninety-eight minutes, with Alida Valli as Thérèse and a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Colpi was an editor: Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad passed through his hands. With this, his first film, he won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1961, sharing it with Viridiana.