An old lady returns from Africa where she made a fortune to find her son in Paris, whom she has not seen in five years, with the intention of bringing him back with her. But this project fails.

A man returns to the place he once lived a passionate love affair with a woman who is now dead. So powerful are the emotions that seize him that he imagines she is still alive, and begins to live as if this were the case...

1977 film by Marguerite Duras

1967 film by Marguerite Duras

1978 film

1972 film by Marguerite Duras

1979 film by Marguerite Duras

Ernesto, a seven-year-old boy who has the body of a thirty-year-old man, decides, upon attending his first day of school, that he no longer wishes to attend, because he does not wish to be taught matters that he does not know.

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.

Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.