Marguerite Duras lived in a little flay in what was once the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville on the Normandy coast for over thirty years. She spent long periods of time there from 1963 to 1996. She would stare out of the window towards the horizon line, or at least was photographed often staring out of the window towards the horizon line. Though undoubtedly there at all different seasons, the Trouville coast seen through Duras’ eyes – in novels and films – is wintery. Trouville is a winter place for Duras, living the latter part of her life there, before the seasons ultimately ceased their cycle on the first floor in Apartment 105.

Gustave Flaubert fell in love while staying in the same hotel when he was still a teenager; Claude Monet painted the hotel in 1870 on likely an empty Sunday afternoon; and Marcel Proust stayed there regularly, including trips with his own mother a few doors down in Apartment 110. Balbec of Proust’s novel is itself a shadow version of the general area of Cabourg just further up the coast, however.

The hotel is cultural node on the coastline, and Duras almost finalises it, drawing all of it together, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes overtly, and especially in her films. The space of the hotel and the winter seascape outside is a defining image of her later works, no longer dominated by the colonial images of a warm, stifling Gia-Dinh, the province that would eventually become Saigon when Cochin china became Vietnam.

I believe this wintery atmosphere comes not just from being in the resort at that time of year but from seeing with an eye that’s looking back on a life. Duras is refreshing when it comes to reassessing the past as she is far from nostalgic. She is instead a natural post-war progression from Proust’s pleasures of the past in some regards but with a decidedly bitter flavour.

She looks to the war and, most importantly, lost loves with both longing and awareness that the gap growing will always become larger than smaller. Many lost loves, in fact, manifest through this building and the beach outside. She may take some pleasure in reminiscing, as she clearly does in her novel Yann Andréa Steiner (1992), but such an act cannot escape the reality that the love was in some way still lost, in the past tense. No warmth of memory can remove the ultimate chill of her sorrowful present, the endlessly empty rooms of the hotel in Trouville’s icy winters echoing with their lack of voices.

Yann Andréa Steiner is an interesting novel because of this use of the space. The love burgeoning between the much older Duras and the twenty-eight year old Steiner feels a brief interlude between the isolation of the coastline. There is something knowing about Duras’ exploration of the unusual affair, not least in how precarious it was. Steiner himself was more of a fan than a lover, one who became romantically involved after he met the writer when she introduced her film India Song at his university. The events were partly adapted later from Steiner’s perspective and his own diary into the film Cet Amour-là (2003) but there’s something lacking from the film, if only because it fails to capture Trouville’s (and Duras’) oncoming winter.

In her novel, Duras even touches on past frustrations embedded into the hotel and the coastline, touching specifically upon Proust and his overwhelming jealousy over questionable relations that his lover Albertine may or may not have been having with another woman. She wrote that ‘these slow evenings, you remember, when they were dancing in front of him, the two naughty young girls, he, tortured by the desire of them who were on the verge of losing their lives and who cried there, on the sofa in the large living room with sea view.’ Desire is a burden in Trouville.

Fittingly, when Chantal Akerman adapted Proust’s The Captive (La Captive) in 2000, the film ends on the coast at a hotel at winter, with the characters both ending up in the water, one disappearing under the waves. The film fails to achieve the complex array of emotions, however, instead basking in a simplistic, cold distance.

Duras herself would document the hotel most effectively in her film work, filming features and shorts back-to-back there and then reconfiguring their themes with differing voiceovers. This is most apparent in a pair of films, the feature film, Agatha and the Limitless Readings (Agatha et les lectures illimitées, 1981), and the short, The Atlantic Man (L’homme Atlantique, 1981). Both have slow, roving eyes that follow wordless characters, communicating like ghosts through voiceovers. The performers may just as well not be in the same room, such is the cold distance between them. Lovers recount times when they were closer, wandering past each other as if deceased and floating to some wintery beyond.

Duras allows herself to be part of these films and their narratives too as an all-seeing presence. This is her lonely realm. In the long mirrors of the hotel, her camera and her image appears, not caring about any potential break in continuity or the filmic world. How can there be when these films are so personal, when her own voice often tells of what she’s trying to achieve in photographing these actors wandering around her memories and home? The rooms are large and empty, where writers and artists once sought and lost their various loves and desires there is now only the breeze rattling the shutters. Duras’ work is a haunting, an inability to fully lock the past in its box. Instead the writer locks herself within it, drifting through these cold reflections like her camera does within the mirrors. As she suggests in her own voiceover, ‘The camera will now capture your reappearance, in the mirror parallel to that which it sees itself.’