Moderato cantabile

Jeanne Moreau is with her son at a piano lesson. A fuss in the street alerts her that something is going on in the street. A woman has been killed in a nearby bar. She goes there and meets Jean-Paul Belmondo, who witnessed the event. They begin a brief affair.

Under the direction of Peter Brook we get one of Mlle Moreau's typically fine performances. The story, however, is very slight. We are to see the emptiness of her life, her indifferent husband, and his dull business associates at their haute-cuisine dinners, her lack of connection to anyone save her child. Her concern with the murder is an obvious issue, with its concerns about the evanescence of life. Yet that soon evaporates. Her inability to connect to another adult save through sex renders her as shallow as the dinner guests. The audience is held in suspense, hoping she will achieve something deeper.

the atmosphere. the Duras mark. the mark of Peter Brooks. and the performances. a Belmondo who conquest a special status, exploring a role who has the force of nuances. Jeanne Moreau - the same and different. the piano's lessons. and the city. a film about solitude in a honest, cruel manner. slices from Madame Bovary. and the search of sense in the presence of the other. the mixture of temptation and fear, expectation and sin, the form of illusion and the brutal end does it a gem. not only for the artistic virtues but for a special manner to use the novel for the portrait of a small world. a film of music as piece from silhouettes, dialogs and fall. a not real comfortable film. but useful.

This has to be one of the dullest films of the early Sixties. Remember that Godard, Malle, Truffaut and company had been challenging the traditions of story telling; the world seemed young again, and full of possibilities. Moderato cantabile has nothing of this spirit. It might have been made by an old-guard director like Clément or Delannoy (if they had decided to take a chance on a Duras script).

There isn't much energy or interest in this story: what happens in the first ten minutes is endlessly rehashed throughout the remainder. Belmondo is ill at ease here, or at least seems that way to me--there is no chance for any extroversion, exuberance or even anger from the character. Jeanne Moreau is used decoratively (Brook must have seen what Resnais was able to do with Delphine Seyrig in Last Year In Marienbad) and always looks elegant, if never really desperate or anguished. You know something's wrong when the piano teacher provides much of the dramatic interest: she's bullying the child into giving her a Diabelli sonata "moderately, with a singing feeling".

Note: I have just remembered that Clément did do a Duras script (Barrage contre le Pacifique) in 1958.

for the Duras's atmosphere. for the lead actors. for the story, landscapes, dialogs, the piano lesson or for its end. for the illustration of a state of soul as result of a mixture of sin, fear, high expectations and fall. a film about a woman and a man. all in simple manner presented. a town. and few meetings. and level of dark revelation. a film of silhouettes and silence. and it is enough for discover an universe who could be part from yourself. a film about choices. and about a strange form of music. Jeanne Moreau is not a surprise. Belmondo is the perfect choice despite the expectations about other actor if you read the novel. the result - not comfortable but good occasion for reflection. about love. and about versions of Madame Bovary.

"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.