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Overrated and overhyped

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

for the Duras's atmosphere. for the lead actors. for the story, landscapes, dialogs, the piano lesson or for its end. for the illustration of a state of soul as result of a mixture of sin, fear, high expectations and fall. a film about a woman and a man. all in simple manner presented. a town. and few meetings. and level of dark revelation. a film of silhouettes and silence. and it is enough for discover an universe who could be part from yourself. a film about choices. and about a strange form of music. Jeanne Moreau is not a surprise. Belmondo is the perfect choice despite the expectations about other actor if you read the novel. the result - not comfortable but good occasion for reflection. about love. and about versions of Madame Bovary.

"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.

"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.

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.