Moderato cantabile

Peter Brook acquired the rights to the successful Nouveau Roman 'Moderato Cantabile' from author Marguerite Duras as a vehicle for Jeanne Moreau with whom he had worked on stage in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. Brook's previous film 'The Beggar's Opera' had hardly been a resounding success which made it difficult to get funding for this latest venture. However, thanks to the Herculean efforts of producer Raoul Levy the necessary funds came through. Levy and his backers must surely have been disheartened by the films failure outside of France. Such a pity also that the film became lumbered with the ghastly alternative title of 'Seven Days....Seven Nights', the suggestiveness of which was obviously designed to get bums on seats. Jeanne Moreau as Anne, the bored and unfulfilled wife of a rich industrialist, is attending a piano lesson at which her young son Pierre is struggling, under the stern eye of his piano teacher, to get to grips with the 'moderato cantabile' movement of a sonatina by Diabelli. They are interrupted by the blood-curdling scream of a woman in the bar next door who has presumably been murdered by her lover. Anne becomes intrigued by and obsessed with the crime and the reasons for it. She meets Chauvin, one of her husband's employees, who seems to offer an explanation and they begin what can only be described as a 'metaphysical' relationship which to Anne's despair, does not progress to the physical....... This film comes within the Golden Age for stage-trained Jeanne Moreau that began with 'Lift to the Scaffold' for Louis Malle in 1957. Her performance here as Anne is utterly mesmerising and fully justifies her being described by Orson Welles as 'simply the greatest'. As Chauvin Jean-Paul Belmondo is frankly miscast and by all accounts was bored and mystified by the whole enterprise. His instinctive talent and undeniable screen presence carry him through. Young Didier Haudepin is splendid as Pierre and would excel four years later in 'A Special Friendship', a forgotten masterpiece of Jean Delannoy. Colette Regis certainly makes an impression in her two scenes as Mlle Giraud the piano teacher. The highlight of the film is the dinner party where Anne finally cracks, the direction of which by Brook is superlative. The final scene between Anne and Chauvin also leaves a deep impression. Shot in lustrous black and white by Armand Thirard this is a compelling and haunting work the power of which lies in its restraint. Moreau's astonishing portrayal won her a Palme d'Or and the film itself marked the start of a long and fruitful collaboration with Marguerite Duras. In 2001 she came full circle by playing Duras in 'Cet amour-la'.

"Moderato cantabile" (1960) directed by Peter Brook was a movie with a certain spleen of its weather, like a love story in a foggy atmosphere near or not too much far away in Gascogne Gulf from the quite distant channel between England and France. The couple had met in a coffee break at the place of the port and both were seeing each other concerning a criminal environment from the daily journey, nowhere outside with the police searching for somebody helping to solve the killing of someone there.

Director Peter Brook so happy with his career, that he forgot perhaps in making more movies like this one, even though this one it was not so easy in finishing it, but that unfinished touch is not evanescent. This kind of appearance from the main characters, a woman with a child and a man, both young and the message it was there like that. A stylish look for both main characters that knowing something else about an event have an approach to a soft sentimental adventure and forgotten the reality of their acquaintance created a link of friendship without any presumption for after tomorrow.

Because it seems if did you understood that, something is always possible when things are confused for the minds and the first is breathing well and expelled oxygenate air, making steam by night : reconciliation brought her for another stand of high society from the time. It seems also that the screenplay came from someone who had much pleasure to bring any confusion in the mind of the characters with her - because is a she - deconstruction in her obsessive purpose, that life is not so important around if a kiss save your honor and butterfly. This is the strength of Marguerite Duras story adapted anyway by Peter Brook with a kind of innovative and quite prejudice against savagery of the time, during persecutions in France, because colonial defeat at the time mixed with resistance from Gironde tradition where the story came from.

In a small provincial town that time neglects, two lost souls meander round quite circumspect, an imperceptible entwine, fading in and out of time, both longing for a moment to connect. One is captured in a marriage like a fly, cocooned inside a coffin left to die, the other, isolated, all his options firmly gated, unable to remove the bonds that tie.

Once again, Jeanne Moreau delivers a performance few other actors could have managed, both then and now, more than ably supported by a sullen Jean-Paul Belmondo, they both leave you wishing they were alive in a more modern world, where tradition and fear of the institutions that bind them have all but vanished, and they can be who they want to be. Although without those shackles the connections may well have been quite different.

"Moderato Cantibile" was only the second film by the great British director Peter Brook and it proved, like Welles before him, that he was equally adept in either medium. It was made in France in 1960 and has now largely been forgotten, though at the time the magazine Films and Filming selected it as the best film of the year from any source and it's a masterpiece. It's also one of the most beautiful black and white films to be made in the Cinemascope format. (Armand Thirard was the DOP).

It's about a respectable,if unhappily married, woman in a grim little coastal town in France who drifts into an affair of sorts with a man from farther down the social ladder. They are played, magnificently, by Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The oblique, brilliant screenplay is by Marguerite Duras and Gerard Jarlot from a novel by Duras and anyone remotely interested in cinema as an art-form should seek it out.

Two beautiful ugly ones, or two ugly beautiful ones, a perfect couple on the screen. Neither Belmondo nor Jeanne Moreau were beauties, they had an immense personal charm that made them likeable. Plus a great talent in expressing with terrible ease what thousands of other actors struggle in vain to express. Both, Moreau and Belmondo, did not even need words, they could convey enormously just by their presence, just by a look. Two geniuses of cinematography who delighted my childhood in particular and my adult life, I saw almost all their films, only this "Moderato Cantabile" was missing because, made in 1960, I was too young, I was less than 2 years old at the time and I don't even know if it was in the cinemas in Bucharest. I found it on YouTube now in March 2025 and watched it with great interest, although I was very tired, with many hours of sleep minus. A very delicate film that is worth seeing. However, knowing the extremely low intellectual level of today, it will only be of interest to those who know who Moreau and Belmondo were.