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Moderato cantabile, dir. Peter Brook, France / Italy 1960, 91 min.
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 and 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.
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 and 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.
Book tickets
04:30 pm
Sat, 20 Jul 2024
Cinema 1
£13 Full Price / £11 Concessions. £5 for 25 and Under.
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no. 236848.