This over-polite adaptation of the French writer Marguerite Duras’s semi-autobiographical book (published in 1985 as La Douleur) about life in occupied Paris during the second world war has the feel of an Audible audiobook reading. Duras’s soul-stripping words are here, but little thought appears to have gone into translating them for cinema. Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.

The film opens in 1945, towards the end of the war, as chainsmoking Duras awaits news of her husband, a French resistance activist deported to a concentration camp by the Nazis. The action then switches to a year earlier, and Duras’s cat-and-mouse relationship with French police agent Pierre Rabier (Benoît Magimel), who arrested him.

Rabier, a jumped up little man with artistic pretensions, is attracted to Duras and summons her daily to bars and cafes, assuring her that he has given orders that her husband not be tortured. He is lying, he must be. But how can she not go along with it?

There is real fire in Thierry’s portrayal of Duras’s magnificent contempt for this minnow and the other French collaborators who drink expensive wine with the Gestapo, fingers in their ears to the turning tide of the war.

Still, Thierry’s performance feels constricted and inscrutable – as if she’s been directed to do “inner turmoil”. In voiceover, Duras says that at every one of her meetings with Rabier she is petrified she will be killed. You can’t tell that from Thierry’s face. Writers who stayed in Paris during the war spoke of it as a quiet city – all bustle and street life silenced – but veteran director Emmanuel Finkiel takes that too far here, muffling the fury and anguish of the book.