John Waters on Marguerite Duras

From Google books (excerpt of an excerpt of Waters' 1987 book Crackpot):

The Films of Marguerite Duras. Miss Duras makes the kind of films that get you punched in the mouth for recommending them to even your closest friends. If there is such a thing as good avant garde cinema, this is it. Even though I believe pretension is the ultimate sin, Marguerite Duras has taken pretension one level ahead of itself and turned it into a style. She is the ultimate eccentric. Her films are maddeningly boring but really quite beautiful. After seeing her work, I think I know what it must feel like to be hypnotized.

Perhaps her most impossible opus to date is The Truck. The entire film consists of the director sitting in a nondescript room with GĂ©rard Depardieu as they read the script of the film while every ten minutes or so the monotony is replaced by yet another monotonous shot of a blue truck, endlessly but serenely driving through the French countryside. If Warhol did it for the Empire State Building, why can't Marguerite Duras do it for French trucks? All I know is that on my first trip to Cannes, in the cab from the Nice airport, I saw Marguerite's "trucks" a hundred times on the highway and felt hypnotized all over again. That's more than I can say for The Car or Car Wash.