Pierre Barat

Who is Milena whose arrival is announced to Sophie and Nicolas by postcard? The train from Prague brings for three weeks, the time of a visa, this young Czech and his bag stuffed with forbidden texts, marginal films and music. She will strive to make them known with the help of her new friends.

Eva is a singer in a Noah's Ark themed nightclub, where the guests wear animal masks. She is approached by a stranger who claims to know her and to remember her singing Mozart.

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.

Eleven-year old Dora (Nathalie Manet) is forced to chase after clues concerning her inventor-father's death while being chased by thugs working for big industry. Not only is she seeking to understand her father's mysterious death, but some of the clues he gave her indicate that he invented something unusual which the big companies want. She barely escapes being kidnapped and is helped in her search by a magical fairy and an aspiring actress.

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.

The full soundtrack to Marguerite Duras' 1975 film India Song, about a French ambassador's wife in 1930s India, is here repurposed with all new cinematography. As we hear all the dialogue of a bygone movie, we travel visually through images of absence and decay, bereft of life. It's the ghost of a film, and a further commentary on colonialism.