In 1977, Marguerite Duras proved that the hypothesis of a film could be the most beautiful of films. That hypothetical film is Le Camion: cinema reduced to almost nothing, and yet the whole of cinema; the mere possibility of a film, and cinema in the fullness of its power. Le Camion is a screenplay read by a woman, Marguerite Duras, to a man, Gérard Depardieu, before the camera. It tells the story of a woman who gets into a lorry and of her encounter with its driver. It is about men and women, the lives of immigrants in France in the 1970s, and the end of the world. From time to time, one or the other briefly interrupts the reading with a comment. From time to time, the filming of the reading is interrupted by the passage of a lorry through the landscapes of Paris’s outer suburbs. ‘Is it a film?’ ‘It would have been a film, yes… It is a film.’
In 1977, making this film was an act of genius and madness. In 2026, Jacques Meilleurat makes a gesture that is perhaps even madder: he remakes Le Camion. Mad or foolhardy? To take on such a monument… But that is precisely the point: by remaking Le Camion, he also unmakes the monument, repeating the miracle of taking cinema back to zero, laying it bare, so alive and so beautiful in its simplest form. It must be said that Meilleurat has been making such beautiful films with almost nothing, year after year. Last year, all it took was to film himself alone at a table, reading and writing Si petite, Frédéric Boyer’s harrowing account of an infanticide.
To remake Le Camion, he called on Fanny Ardant to play the reader, cast his own son Basile as the man who listens, and, in the role of the lorry, a contemporary model: the Centaure that gives the film its title. Why Fanny Ardant? A few sentences are enough for the answer to become obvious: her voice—its timbre and cadence—sounds like a reprise, a double of Duras’s own. The revelation of this striking resemblance produces the characteristic sensation of Meilleurat’s cinema: vertigo. And while the actors’ few improvised exchanges betray the fact that the film was made today, the black-and-white digital image, in place of the original colour 35mm, transports us, with the film, back to the origins of cinema, to the age of séance tables and invocations. Through Fanny Ardant’s voice, Le Camion becomes a revenant.
Cyril Neyrat