Peter Brook (1960)

According to the BFI handout, Peter Brook was aiming to strip away all of what he saw as conventional dramatic elements of film narrative.   He succeeds in making Moderato Cantabile unconventional – like the Marguerite Duras novel on which it’s based (which I read in French thirty or so years ago but could barely remember).  Yet the film is unquestionably and intensely dramatic.  Adapted by Duras herself with Gérard Jarlot, Moderato Cantabile is about the relationship of Anne Desbarèdes, the wife of a wealthy factory owner, and Chauvin, a worker at the factory.  The setting is an anonymous seaport (although the lighting is very different, some of the shots of the seafront recall Le quai des brumes).   The title refers to the musical instructions for the Diabelli sonatina which Anne’s young son Pierre is learning to play.  He fails or refuses to remember what moderato cantabile means:  he’s his mother’s son and Anne’s temperament, as it’s revealed in the course of the story, doesn’t allow for an emotional life lived ‘at a gentle pace and melodiously’.  As a result, the Diabelli music has a formal, constraining quality, which also corresponds to the visual scheme (the film was photographed, in black and white, by Armand Thirard).  The Desbarèdes live in a big, imposing house the high railings of which – through which the mansion is often shown – suggest a prison.  The tangle of trees in the forest where Anne walks with her son and sometimes goes with Chauvin has something of the same effect – as well as signifying a wilderness, a place both liberating and isolating.   (There’s one extraordinary shot down into the forest – from treetops that look like marks on blotting paper.)   The shots through the window of the seafront café (a crucial location) – looking from the outside in or vice versa – complete the sense of entrapment.

Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo are coruscating film stars.  As actors, their technical control and their protean qualities are astounding.  The technique they use to change not just mood but their whole physical and emotional presence is as magically imperceptible as its effects are powerful.  They create a completely sustained tension, both as individuals and in their interactions.  The way that Moreau handles a glass of wine and drinks it down is wonderfully expressive of Anne’s wary excitement transmuting into a kind of stunned, rebellious, sensual greed; she inhabits a fur coat so that it becomes a form of protection and of self-exposure.  Moreau’s Anne is a bored, composed haute bourgeoise one moment and an abandoned (in both senses) woman the next; she’s sullenly sombre, then luminous.  The shifts reflect the volatility of her involvement with Chauvin:  Duras names him presumably for his treatment of Anne but Belmondo develops something more subtle and complex.  Although he emerges as a face in the crowd at the start of the film – a crowd which is jostling to peer into the café at the body of a murdered woman – Belmondo isn’t really convincing as one of the workers:  he wears his clothes in a way that makes him look too stylish.  But he’s brilliant – uncanny – in how he metamorphoses.  We sometimes seem to see Chauvin simply as himself, and he evokes a slightly baffled solitariness; then as Anne’s image of him.  What she sees may be very close to her or miles away, as the emotional weather of the story changes.

As Pierre, the child Didier Haudepin is marvellous in echoing his mother’s capriciousness (and Moreau plays her scenes with him with a delicate, humorous mixture of regret and tenderness).  Jean Deschamps, Anne’s handsomely reptilian husband, has a fine censorious reserve.  Colette Régis, as the piano teacher, adds colour and flavour to the film.   The performances and Brook’s direction of the actors give every sequence – from the opening music lesson – an emotional pressure that draws you in and holds you, even when what’s being exchanged by the characters, in words or silences, is harder to pin down – or feels artificial.  Anne and Chauvin, who first see each other after looking through the café window at the corpse, conduct a courtship through the proxy of the murder that’s taken place.  We’ve seen the dead woman’s lover weeping over her body then being handcuffed and taken away by the police.  Anne asks Chauvin to tell her the story of these two lovers and he does so – next time she asks, he tells a different story.  Duras seems to use this as a dual metaphor – to suggest both the constraints on communication between Anne and Chauvin (it’s never made clear how far the physical relationship develops) and the transient and brutal aspects of a love affair – that of Anne and Chauvin, as much as of the two unnamed lovers.

Both these couplings are based in the café and it feels inevitable throughout that the murder at the start is going to be repeated – either literally or metaphorically – as an unhappy ending to the central relationship.  Yet when Anne howls in anguish after Chauvin has left her, Jeanne Moreau’s individuality transforms this formal reiteration of the dying cries of the woman, which brought the crowd running to the café early in the film.   And when Anne then has to pick herself up and emerge from the café to return to her husband in his sleek, funereal car, the fact that her life goes on makes it seem a fate worse than death.   What’s compelling about Moderato Cantabile isn’t ultimately the themes of Duras’s story.  It’s the experience of watching the characters she uses to express those themes being interpreted by two great actors.

5 May 2009