"Moderato Cantibile" was only the second film by the great British director Peter Brook and it proved, like Welles before him, that he was equally adept in either medium. It was made in France in 1960 and has now largely been forgotten, though at the time the magazine Films and Filming selected it as the best film of the year from any source and it's a masterpiece. It's also one of the most beautiful black and white films to be made in the Cinemascope format. (Armand Thirard was the DOP).
It's about a respectable,if unhappily married, woman in a grim little coastal town in France who drifts into an affair of sorts with a man from farther down the social ladder. They are played, magnificently, by Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The oblique, brilliant screenplay is by Marguerite Duras and Gerard Jarlot from a novel by Duras and anyone remotely interested in cinema as an art-form should seek it out.
It's about a respectable,if unhappily married, woman in a grim little coastal town in France who drifts into an affair of sorts with a man from farther down the social ladder. They are played, magnificently, by Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The oblique, brilliant screenplay is by Marguerite Duras and Gerard Jarlot from a novel by Duras and anyone remotely interested in cinema as an art-form should seek it out.