Peter Brook's MODERATO CANTABILE was praised in its day, but has nearly been forgotten. Not a crowd pleaser, this is a film that will probably appeal to a limited audience. The screenplay is based on the Marguerite Duras novel of the same name. Duras deliberately avoided dramatic incident for the main characters and wanted to only observe their interior states. In the film, Brooks tries to find an equivalent for this approach and he succeeds. From the opening scene, we can see we are in for an unusual type of film experience. A young boy is in the middle of a piano lesson. We see his teacher react with impatience to the boy's distracted dreaminess. The boy's mother, Anne (Jeanne Moreau), tries to keep him on track, but little is accomplished. Then, a woman's scream is heard from outside the window. Boy, mother and teacher look out to see a great deal of commotion and police presence in front of a café next door. When the woman goes down to look, she sees a female corpse in the café and a man being led away by police. Surreptitiously watching Anne is Chauvin (Jean-Paul Belmondo). For the first third of the film, he will follow the mother and son around the town (Blaye, near Bordeaux). Idly rich and bored, the pair have little to do but wander in the woods and ride the ferry across the dull, gray Gironde river. Chauvin has little to do himself and one day he approaches Anne. After a short time, they begin a romance. The romance is presented in a very muted, unprovocative way. What is interesting about it is the way that Anne insists on Chauvin narrating his rendition of the story behind the shot woman and the man in the café. It's clear that an analogy is being made between that couple and the film's protagonists. The drama in this story happens to other people, not to the main characters. Clandestine meetings continue and at one point Chauvin decides he has had enough of Anne's need to live a vicarious tragedy. He puts her off and refuses to continue.
The film goes to great length to express the isolation of these characters: a bored, lonely rich man's wife in an enormous estate and a solitary factory worker (we are only told he works there, we don't see it). Brooks and his cinematographer Armand Thirard do a fine job of establishing the overwhelming melancholy of this story. Locations are used to express the characters' emotional states in much the same way that Antonioni uses locations in his films. This film seems to be saying that some are trapped in their lives and there is only temporary, perhaps imagined, escape from the dull greyness of it all. A piano sonatina by Diabelli is the only music used for the soundtrack and its Mozartean prettiness seems at odds with the somber tale, perhaps a small touch of irony. Or perhaps an expression of the way small amounts of sunlight can be let into a gray world, singing, but with moderation.
The film goes to great length to express the isolation of these characters: a bored, lonely rich man's wife in an enormous estate and a solitary factory worker (we are only told he works there, we don't see it). Brooks and his cinematographer Armand Thirard do a fine job of establishing the overwhelming melancholy of this story. Locations are used to express the characters' emotional states in much the same way that Antonioni uses locations in his films. This film seems to be saying that some are trapped in their lives and there is only temporary, perhaps imagined, escape from the dull greyness of it all. A piano sonatina by Diabelli is the only music used for the soundtrack and its Mozartean prettiness seems at odds with the somber tale, perhaps a small touch of irony. Or perhaps an expression of the way small amounts of sunlight can be let into a gray world, singing, but with moderation.