La mort du jeune aviateur anglais

The friendship between Jacquot and novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras results in a sublime and palpably intimate organic conversation on the nature of evocation, history, memory, transference, and artistic creation in La Mort du jeune aviateur anglais. A wartime anecdote recounted by Duras - a story that would subsequently serve as the basis for her latest novel Ecrire - provides an appropriately poignant, somber, and thoughtful introduction to the Duras and Jacquot's incisive and illuminating dialogue: a young English aviator - an orphan - who had been shot down during the war and crash landed in a forest in Trouville was adopted in death by the town and given a proper burial and annual commemoration. The gesture would move Duras profoundly, a story that, as she subsequently muses, perhaps resonates with the trauma of her own brother's death at a young age, or perhaps with the romantic idea of lost youth. From this seemingly innocuous episode, Duras embarks on a thoughtful meditation on the frailty of the human condition, her meticulously detailed, proposed manner of filming the site of the aviator's grave (which Jacquot faithfully recreates on film), the ephemeral process of remembering, the isolation of memory, and the happenstance of inspiration.