Isabelle Huppert read Marguerite Duras in Guangzhou

Screenshot from GOH promo video

One is Isabelle Huppert, French actress, multiple winner of Best Actress awards at Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival and Venice Film Festival;

One is Marguerite Duras, French novelist, legendary writer enjoying a global reputation for her literary works and her novel The Lover (French: L'Amant) wellknown among Chinese readers;

Two French women, from different times and spaces, gathered on the stage through a special form in Guangzhou, a metropolis building itself a “theater capital”.

Screenshot from GOH promo video

On the night of June 12, France’s national treasure Isabelle Huppert read Marguerite Duras’s novel The Lover at the Opera Hall of Guangzhou Opera House (GOH). Almost all 1,800 seats were occupied at the Opera Hall, thunderous applauses erupting before and after the 70-minute non-stop reading performance.

With simple projective backdrop and music from the movie India Song directed by Marguerite Duras, Isabelle Huppert sat on a rattan chair, walked around the stage, and read to the audience, smiling, musing, yelling, sobbing...

Isabelle Huppert (L) attends a press conference at GOH on the morning of June 12. [Photo provided to Newsgd.com]

After the show, a local female audience said that she was surprised the performance was a sell-out and that she didn’t understand French, but she was deeply touched by Isabelle Huppert’s appealing performance.

The performance is part of the 12th Croisements Festival and GOH Anniversary Season. Before Guangzhou, Isabelle Huppert gave a performance in Shanghai on June 11 and will performed in Beijing on June 14 as well.

About L'Amant

L'Amant is a semi-autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 and was awarded the Prix Goncourt in the same year. It has been translated into 43 languages and sold thousands of copies worldwide. Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, L'Amant reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man. The novel was adapted to film in 1992 as The Lover . China’s Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai starred in the film.