La voix d’une femme.

Today we have recorded the female voice for the multiplayer part of Bientôt l’été. In this part of the game, you sit down with another player at a café table. The objects you collected on the beach can be put on the table and the phrases you collected can be spoken. Each player puts or says something in turn. Like a game of chess.

Over 200 phrases were selected from multiple novels by Marguerite Duras. Some are very poetic, but many are plain. For the tone we follow Duras’ own style of reading from her work, as she did in many of her films: very dry and neutral. This fits perfectly with her writing style. On the surface the words may seem banal, and sometimes indifferent or cruel, but that only heightens the sense of extreme passion that the characters are going through. At least that’s the effect this has on me.

There’s two characters in the game, a man and a woman. Both have the same phrases at their disposal. For the female voice, we were as fortunate as to find an even bigger Duras fan that I in Mademoiselle Fabienne Mésenge, a multi-talented actress/director herself.

She clearly enjoyed performing Duras’ words, surrounded by the organ pipes in the studio of Bientôt l’été composer Walter Hus in Brussels. The recording went much more smoothly than anticipated. But the second session, after un verre de vin was clearly the better one!

It was very moving to me to hear the text. I can’t wait to record the male voice and put it all in the game and then play!