Peter Brook acquired the rights to Marguerite Duras’s bestseller, 'Moderato Cantabile’, as a vehicle for Jeanne Moreau whom he had directed in a theatrical production of 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. But the endeavour was much more collaborative than many filmic adaptations of Duras’s work. Duras and Brook co-wrote the script and then travelled down France’s western coast together, before arriving in Blaye: an industrial town on the Gironde estuary, which they deemed perfect through being “hopeless”, “static” and “sordid”. 

In Moderato Cantabile, Jeanne Moreau – whose large eyes and downturned mouth dominate much of the screen time – plays Anne, the wife of a rich industrialist, whose lack of fulfilment is reflected in the significance her son’s weekly piano lessons assume: as one of her few excursions and occasions of social contact. One day, as her son is trying to master the moderato cantabile – “moderate and melodic” – movement of a sonatina by Diabelli, the lesson is interrupted by the screams of a woman in the square below: murdered, it seems, by her male partner. Anne becomes consumed by this event, returning to the scene of the crime over and over again. There, she meets one of her husband’s workers (Jean-Paul Belmondo, who shot Breathless in the same year), and they spend a week obsessively dissecting and discussing the crime, as Anne’s morbid impulses, and perhaps a death wish, become apparent.

The film will be preceded by a short interview Marguerite Duras conducted with Jeanne Moreau in 1965.

The programme will be introduced by writer and academic Lili Owen Rowlands.