Moderato cantabile (1960)

User Rating:

6.5/10   

Director:

Peter Brook

Writers:

Marguerite Duras (novel)
Marguerite Duras (adaptation)

Release Date:

25 May 1960 (France)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

A wealthy and bored woman (Moreau) is witness of a murder in affection and meets another witness (Belmondo)...

Plot Keywords:

Psychological Drama | Based On Novel

Awards:

1 win & 1 nomination

Cast

Jeanne Moreau	...	Anne Desbarèdes
Jean-Paul Belmondo	...	Chauvin
Pascale de Boysson	...	Bar's owner
Jean Deschamps	...	M. Desbarèdes
Didier Haudepin	...	Pierre
Colette Régis	...	Miss Giraud
Valeric Dobuzinsky	...	Assassin (as Valéric)

Also Known As:

Moderato cantabile: Storia di uno strano amore (Italy)
Seven Days... Seven Nights (UK)

Runtime:

91 min | France:95 min | Argentina:95 min

Country:

Italy | France

Language:

French

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Certification:

Argentina:16 | West Germany:16

Company:

Documento Film

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Une femme est une femme (1961)

Steam and fog

"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.