Eva (Joseph Losey, 1962)

Jeanne Moreau in Eva

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Ricardo Garrone, Lisa Gastoni, Checco Rissone, Enzo Fiermonte, Nona Medici, Alexis Revidis, Peggy Guggenheim, Giorgio Albertazzi. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Evan Jones, based on a novel by James Hadley Chase. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Henri Decaë. Production design: Richard Macdonald, Luigi Scaccianoce. Film editing: Reginald Beck, Franca Silvi. Music: Michel Legrand. 

Jeanne Moreau, as was so often the case when she was cast in a movie, is the best thing about Joseph Losey's Eva. She plays a high-class prostitute who makes the messy life of Welsh novelist Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) even messier. He has hit the jackpot with his best-selling novel, now made into a movie, and is living it up in Venice when he meets Moreau's Eve Olivier. The rest is the old familiar story of the undoing of a man who has already started to come undone, so there's not much plot to follow in Eva. There are some glimpses of Venice and Rome in winter, denuded of tourists, and some interest to be had in watching how the inevitable occurs, but apart from capable performances, Eva doesn't have much else to recommend itself. 

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World 

Cast: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max Von Sydow, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Adelle Lutz, Ernie Dingo, Ernest Beck, Christine Oesterlein, Kuniko Miyaki, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, David Gulpilil, Justine Saunders, Paul Livingston. Screenplay: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Sally Campbell, Thierry Flamand. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Graeme Revell.

Wim Wenders's almost five-hour-long cut of Until the End of the World may be the most self-indulgent film I've ever seen, and I've seen Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). The original cut of Wenders's movie was 20 hours long, but it was reduced to just under three hours for its first European release and to a bit over two and a half hours for American audiences in 1991. It failed with the critics and the box office. Wenders finally re-edited it to the 287-minute version released in 2015 and now being shown on the Criterion Channel. But it really seems to me to be two movies stitched together by Sam Neill's voiceover narration. The first half is what Wenders himself has called the "ultimate road movie," a characteristic genre for the director of Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), starting in Venice and then bouncing to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, and finally Australia, where it settles for the second half. This half is a sci-fi film about experiments with perception and dreams that take place in the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. The first half is often funny; the second half isn't. I'm not prepared to call Until the End of the World a masterpiece, unless it's a masterpiece for cineastes, who can indulge themselves to the fullest in tracing the allusions and influences that shape the movie. The characters played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, for example, spend time in an idyllic setting in Japan where they're tended by characters played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyaki, actors familiar from the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Hurt's character's parents are played by the iconic Jeanne Moreau and Max Von Sydow. Wenders even evokes his own past by casting Rüdiger Vogler, the star of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. It's a witty film in many regards, but as I said, self-indulgent. And 287 minutes is a kind of forced binge-watch, which makes me think that Until the End of the World would have made a terrific miniseries for Netflix or Hulu if they'd been around in 1991.

Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)

Maurice Ronet in Elevator to the Gallows

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall, Iván Petrovich, Elga Andersen, Lino Ventura. Screenplay: Roger Nimier, Louis Malle, based on a novel by Noël Calef. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Art direction: Jean Mandaroux, Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Léonide Azar. Music: Miles Davis.

Crime doesn't pay, we're often told, and if any movie seemed designed to make that point it's Louis Malle's first non-documentary feature Elevator to the Gallows which is about two intersecting crimes that both go wrong. The first is the plot by Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) to kill his boss, Simon Carala, whose wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), is Julien's mistress. Things begin to go wrong when Julien's car is stolen during the carefully plotted murder and Julien finds himself trapped overnight in an elevator. Then the car thief, Louis (Georges Poujouly), and his girlfriend, Véronique (Yori Bertin), go for a joy ride, during which Florence spots the car with Véronique in it and thinks Julien has abandoned her. Meanwhile, the joyriders find Julien's identification in the car they have stolen and check in under his name in a motel on the outskirts of Paris. They wind up partying with a German couple, taking pictures of the group that Véronique leaves for developing. But Louis murders the German couple when he tries to steal their Mercedes so he can abandon Julien's car. Oh, murder will out, too. Moreau was already well known in France as a stage actress, but her performance in Elevator to the Gallows made her a movie star, especially after Malle cast her in his next film, The Lovers (1958). The engaging twists of the film are given a melancholy cast by Miles Davis's evocative score.

Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel, 1964)

Jeanne Moreau and Michel Piccoli in Diary of a Chambermaid

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Georges Géret, Daniel Ivernel, Françoise Lugagne, Muni, Jean Ozenne, Michel Piccoli. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière, based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau. Cinematography: Roger Fellous. Production design: Georges Wakhévitch. Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur.

Jeanne Moreau's aura of knowingness serves as a filter through which we view the Monteil household in Luis Buñuel's sharp-edged satire on wealth and privilege.

La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte

Lidia Pontano: Jeanne Moreau

Giovanni Pontano: Marcello Mastroianni 

Valentina Gherardini: Monica Vitti 

Tommaso Garani: Bernhard Wicki 

Gherardini: Vincenzo Corbella 

Signora Gherardini: Gritt Magrini 

Roberto: Giorgio Negro 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra 

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo 

Production design: Piero Zuffi 

Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 

Music: Giorgio Gaslini 

Movie stars often provide a shortcut to establishing the backstories of the characters they play. Once we see the bruised intelligence of Jeanne Moreau and the weary elegance of Marcello Mastroianni, familiar to us from their previous films, we know something about their characters, Lidia and Giovanni Pontano, that the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte doesn't need to tell us. We know there will be tension in their marriage, that Lidia will go for long solitary walks and that Giovanni will yield to almost any temptation that crosses his path. Giovanni is a successful writer, but the money that affords them a handsome apartment in Milan mostly comes from her, which gives her one reason to feel resentful when she's shunted aside by his celebrity. So La Notte is mostly about her lonely search for a raison d'etre while he indulges himself with the pleasures of the moment: the come-on of a sex-crazed woman in a hospital, a celebratory book-signing, a night club floor show, a flirtation with the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, a lucrative job offer from that industrialist. Lidia even seems to be trying to find ways of indulging herself the way her husband does: On her long walk through Milan, she plays at being a prostitute, throwing backward glances at men she passes on the street, though never making the essential connection. She tries to break up a fight between two young men from what seem to be rival street gangs, but when the shirtless victor of the fight pursues her, she flees. She gets a kind of erotic charge from watching a group set off skyrockets. And she escapes from the industrialist's elaborate all-night party, a kind of tepid orgy manqué, with a handsome young man, only to stop in mid-dalliance and ask him to return her to the party. And so at the end of the film we leave the Pontanos grappling in the dirt as the dawn appears, somehow destined to continue their perverse games. La Notte has more narrative coherence than the other two Antonioni films usually thought of as a trilogy, L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), which makes it essential in understanding what the director is up to. I take the currently prevailing view that Antonioni is less interested in existential alienation than in the lives of women in a society that valorizes male aggression. Hence the pivotal scene in which Lidia meets Valentina, the industrialist's daughter who has been toying with her husband, and instead of fighting they reach a kind of understanding, an assertion of female moral superiority. 

La Truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

Isabelle Huppert in La Truite

Frédérique: Isabelle Huppert
Rambert: Jean-Pierre Cassel
Lou Rambert: Jeanne Moreau
Saint-Genis: Daniel Olbrychski
Galuchat: Jacques Spiesser
Daigo Hamada: Isao Yamagata
Verjon: Jean-Paul Roussillon
The Count: Roland Bertin
Mariline: Lisette Malidor
Carter: Craig Stevens
Party Guest: Ruggero Raimondi
Gloria: Alexis Smith

Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Monique Lange, Joseph Losey
Based on a novel by Roger Vailland
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Marie Castro
Music: Richard Hartley

I wish I had known beforehand that Joseph Losey's La Truite is supposedly a comedy or a "French sex farce" as the description on Rotten Tomatoes puts it. I wouldn't have worried so much that I had lost my sense of humor -- or concluded that Losey didn't know how to tell a joke. Or perhaps I would have laughed more at the scenes that seem to be meant to be funny, like Frédérique's bowling-alley hustle or the one in which she tosses out of the window the taxidermied fish belonging to the man who molested her in adolescence. Or even at the absurdity of seeing such luminaries of French cinema as Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in a bowling alley. There was one scene that amused me: Alexis Smith's very funny cameo appearance as the worldly wise Gloria, whom Frédérique, encumbered with an armload of gift-wrapped packages, encounters in a Japanese hotel. But there's really not much humor to be found in stale marriages, suicide attempts, sexual harassment, and an apparent murder, anyway. Mostly La Truite is a slog, with Losey unable to set the proper prevailing tone -- or really any tone -- for his story about a young woman's rise to power and influence. We spend so much time puzzling out who these characters are and what their relationships to one another may be, that there's not much time left to appreciate the story, especially since it's chopped up with flashbacks. We know where we are in time mostly by the length of Frédérique's hair, which starts out in her childhood in the trout hatchery as a waist-length red mane, has become a pageboy bob by the time she meets the Ramberts and Saint-Genis, and is chopped off becomingly when the latter takes her with him to Japan. La Truite is visually interesting, thanks to the work of two veterans of French film: cinematographer Henri Alekan and production designer Alexandre Trauner. But Losey's work as both director and screenwriter lets them, and his cast, down.

Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)

Claude Mann and Jeanne Moreau in Bay of Angels

Jacqueline ("Jackie") Demaistre: Jeanne Moreau
Jean Fournier: Claude Mann
Caron: Paul Guers
M. Fournier: Henri Nassiet
Hotel Clerk: Conchita Parodi

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Jean Rabier
Music: Michel Legrand

A platinum blond Jeanne Moreau, dressed in white, evokes Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), though Moreau's Jackie Demaistre is not so lethal as Turner's Cora Smith. Jackie is modeling herself on both Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, but without Monroe's fragility or the American Jackie's poise. In short, the Jackie Demaistre crafted by Moreau and Jacques Demy is her own woman, and one of film's most memorable. She is a compulsive gambler, whose habit has estranged her from her husband and her small son, but she carries on nevertheless, winning big and losing big, yet somehow surviving even when she bets away her train ticket home -- or more likely, to the next casino. Into her circuit wanders a young bank clerk on his vacation, Jean Fournier, who has been introduced to the gambling life by a co-worker. Jean thinks gambling is immoral, yet once he gets a taste for it, and more to the point, once he meets Jackie, he flings himself headlong into the life. Unfortunately, Jean is played by an actor making his first film, Claude Mann, who although he has a handsome presence is not able to make the character into a coherent figure. Sometimes broody, sometimes violent, sometimes philosophical, sometimes just a callow young man with no aim in life, Jean is mostly obsessed with Jackie, who is obsessed with gambling. She returns his affection in her way, which means that if he stands between her and the roulette wheel, he'd better watch out. She takes up with him because she thinks he brings her luck, and their relationship frays when he doesn't. If Moreau had had someone more compelling than Mann to play against -- one of the hyphenated Jeans, Belmondo or Trintignant, for example -- Bay of Angels might have blown me away. As it is, it's just one of those quintessential French films of the 1960s -- a bit wispy as it comes to plot but full of atmosphere, much of it provided by the casinos of the Riviera and Michel Legrand's score. It has many enthusiastic admirers, but I have a feeling most of the enthusiasm was generated by Moreau, who could always blind one to the defects of her movies.

The Lovers (Louis Malle, 1958)

Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory in The Lovers

Jeanne Tournier: Jeanne Moreau
Bernard Dubois-Lambert: Jean-Marc Bory
Henri Tournier: Alain Cuny
Maggy Thiebaud-Leroy: Judith Magre
Raoul Florès: José Luis de Villalonga
Coudray: Gaston Modot

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louise de Vilmorin
Based on a novel by Dominique Vivant
Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Anna Karenina without the train. That's one way of looking at Louis Malle's once-scandalous but now somewhat tepid The Lovers. That seems to be the way the German censors saw it: a story about a woman who abandons not only her husband but also her child, and seemingly gets away with it. In the German release, the scenes involving Jeanne Tournier's daughter were cut, as if the idea of a mother leaving so adorable a child was too horrible for audiences to contemplate. In the United States, of course, it was the depiction of sex -- not "cutting away to the window" as Malle once described the traditional approach to sex scenes -- that caused the censors to draw their knives. The result was the Supreme Court decision that The Lovers didn't fit Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." He didn't, and it isn't: What we see in the scene are a briefly flashed nipple and the look on Jeanne's face as Bernard brings her to orgasm. Even the fact that she is being pleasured orally by him is only implied by his absence in the frame. The Lovers is more satiric than erotic, its targets the stale marriages and pro forma affairs of an haute bourgeoisie obsessed with hairstyles and polo games. Malle attempts to contrast the sterile dalliances of the idle rich with the more spontaneous relationship between Jeanne and Bernard, a casually dressed archaeologist who drives a clunky tin-can Citroën, but the film gets a little too formulaic, especially in the lushly romantic moonlight stroll and boat ride that serves as foreplay to the consummation of their affair. He switches back to irony at the end: Jeanne and Bernard escape together under the astonished gaze of her husband and her other lover, but we sense their uncertainty about whether it will work, anticipating the way Mike Nichols tempered romance with reality by holding the camera just a little bit too long on Benjamin and Elaine after they escape from the church in The Graduate (1967). Maybe we don't see the train but we hear it approaching.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies 

The Fire Within (Louis Malle, 1963)

Maurice Ronet in The Fire Within

Alain Leroy: Maurice Ronet
Lydia: Léna Skerla
Dubourg: Bernard Noël
Eva: Jeanne Moreau
Solange: Alexandra Stewart

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Based on a novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Suzanne Baron

The Fire Within seems an ironic title for a film about a man whose internal fire has become so low that he plans to, well, snuff it. The French title is Le Feu Follet, which means "will o' the wisp," proverbially "something just out of reach." The thing out of reach for Alain Leroy, a recovering alcoholic whose stay in a clinic has been so effective that his doctor thinks he should go home, is any reason to go on living. Estranged from his wife, who now lives in the United States, he searches for the elusive raison d'être in sex, work, family life, drugs, politics, society, and a return to alcohol, but the quest ends in failure. It's the midlife crisis writ large, but what saves Louis Malle's film from slumping into yet another ennuyant portrait of ennui is the keenly internalized performance of Maurice Ronet as Alain as well as the perverse vitality of the world he is seeking to leave: i.e., Paris in the early 1960s. Malle's vision, in tandem with Ghislain Cloquet's rich black-and-white cinematography, gives us a milieu that presents almost too many reasons to stay alive, so that the problem -- Camus's familiar "one really serious philosophical problem" of suicide -- remains centered in Alain himself. The film crackles with the tension between the world as Alain sees it and the world we see through Malle's eyes.  

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

Orson Welles and Alan Webb in Chimes at Midnight

Falstaff: Orson Welles
Prince Hal: Keith Baxter
King Henry IV: John Gielgud
Poins: Tony Beckley
Mistress Quickly: Margaret Rutherford
Doll Tearsheet: Jeanne Moreau
Hotspur: Norman Rodway
Kate Percy: Marina Vlady
Shallow: Alan Webb
Silence: Walter Chiari
Pistol: Michael Aldridge
Bardolph: Patrick Bedford
Page: Beatrice Welles
Narrator: Ralph Richardson

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Orson Welles
Based on plays by William Shakespeare and the chronicles of Raphael Holinshed
Cinematography: Edmond Richard
Production design: Mariano Erdoiza
Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
Film editing: Elena Jaumandreu, Frederick Muller, Peter Parasheles
Costume design: Orson Welles

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Falstaff wasn't the role Orson Welles was born to play, it was the role he grew -- and grew -- into. He knew he wasn't the great actor he wanted to be: There are countless stories of Welles ducking out of rehearsing scenes in which he appeared, using stand-ins to avoid performing opposite actors he respected. According to Simon Callow's Orson Welles: One-Man Band, Jeanne Moreau recalled that she waited several days to play one of their scenes together in Chimes at Midnight, and when she asked Welles why he said that he had lost his makeup kit: "I can't do any scenes till it's found," he claimed. "We'll start with the reverse shots of you, the close-ups," a technique he often used in which someone else would feed his lines to the other actor, so that Welles could later do his side of the dialogue by himself. When Moreau found the makeup kit on the set, an assistant urged her not to tell Welles: "He has stage-fright. He hid it himself." It's likely, however, that once you've seen Chimes at Midnight, Welles's Falstaff is the image of Shakespeare's character that will always stick in your mind. Other actors have played him as reckless, destructive, self-deluding, foolish, slovenly, and even at heart malicious -- justifications for all of these interpretations and more are present in the text. Welles plays him as just one step ahead of everyone else, so that Prince Hal's final repudiation comes to Falstaff not as a surprise or a crushing blow, but rather as a fulfillment of something he has always suspected might happen. The close-up of Falstaff's face after Hal's dismissal reveals not so much shock or disappointment as a kind of hurt mixed with "I thought this might happen" and even a little pride at having played a role in Hal's evolution toward kingship. It's a tour de force of silent film acting on Welles's part: For once he's not relying on the familiar resonances of his voice. The film itself was a famous commercial disaster, abetted by hostile critics such as the always unreliable Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who scared away many potential distributors. It was caught up in a squabble over rights that kept it from being shown theatrically in Welles's lifetime, and it came into its own after it was restored for video release, which is still the only way most of us have seen it. It's probably the most successful interpretation of Shakespeare for the screen because Welles was not bound by slavish devotion to the source: He picked and chose lines and scenes from at least three Shakespeare plays (Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V) and arranged them in ways that suited the screen more than the stage. The Battle of Shrewsbury scene is a masterpiece of planning and editing, still endlessly imitated. But the film is also full of grand performances, including Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, whose account of Falstaff's death is both funny and heartbreaking, and Keith Baxter as a lively but rather sinister Hal. Welles also showcases John Gielgud better than any filmmaker ever did, allowing him to deliver Henry IV's "uneasy lies the head" monologue in his richly poetic manner, even though the performance is somewhat at odds with the more naturalistic ones of the film's other actors. (It's telling, perhaps, that both Welles and Baxter briefly parody Gielgud's delivery when they come to their mock father-son scene.)

Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

It's tempting to make jokes about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film, Querelle, which does sometimes look like a staging of Billy Budd designed by Tom of Finland. But for all its often overheated, overstylized, absurd moments, there is a a deep sadness at the core of the film. It was made, after all, at the beginning of the age of AIDS, from which its star, Brad Davis, would die. And even though it misses the poetry of the novel by Jean Genet on which Fassbinder and Burkhard Driest based their screenplay, it contains the essential sympathy for transgressors and outcasts that marks the work of both Genet and Fassbinder. That it no longer has the power to shock -- you can see far more outrageous images and situations on pay TV channels almost any night of the week -- almost works to its benefit. It has become a period piece almost before its time, but to say that it's "dated" is to miss the point. Querelle reflects an age of repression: The central character of the film, I think, is Franco Nero's Lt. Seblon, dictating his lust for Querelle into his tape recorder, watching the less-inhibited society of Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), Nono (Günther Kaufmannn), and the others who circle around Querelle like moths, swooping in for satisfaction and sometimes getting their wings singed. Is it a good film? No. The performances -- especially Davis's, whose line readings are sometimes amateurish -- don't measure up. The interpolated religious symbolism feels trite. The narrative, especially when it involves Gil and his double, Robert (Hanno Pöschl), is confusingly handled. But is it worth being annoyed and disappointed by? Absolutely.

The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)

There may be sensibilities more different from each other than those of an exiled Midwestern bon vivant and a consumptive Middle European Jew, but they rarely come together in a work of art the way they did in Orson Welles's version of Franz Kafka's The Trial. It was made in that fertile middle period of Welles's career that also saw the creation of Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), and it holds its own against those two landmarks in the Welles oeuvre. In the end, of course, the Wellesian sensibility dominates, the American tendency to affirmation overcoming (barely) Kafka's pessimism: Welles's Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is rather more assertive than Kafka's protagonist. He doesn't succumb "Like a dog!" to his assailants but defies them. That said, Perkins, now carrying the indelible stamp of Norman Bates into all his roles, is superlative casting: We can believe that he's guilty -- even if we never find out what his supposed crime is -- while at the same time we sympathize with his plight. The real triumph of the film is in finding the settings in which to stage K.'s ordeal, ranging from K.'s stark, low-ceilinged apartment to bleak modern high-rise apartment and office buildings, to ornate beaux arts exteriors, to the labyrinthine courts of the law. The film was shot in the former Yugoslavia, in Italy, and in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris. Welles chose a novice, Edmond Richard, who had never shot a feature film, as his cinematographer. Richard went on to shoot Chimes at Midnight, too, as well as some of Luis Buñuel's best films, including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The cast includes Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli, and Akim Tamiroff, with Welles himself playing the role of Hastler, K.'s attorney, after failing to persuade Jackie Gleason or Charles Laughton to take the part. The Trial is probably longer and slower than it needs to be, and there is some inconsistency of style: The scenes involving Hastler, his mistress (Schneider), and K. are shot with more extreme closeups than the rest of the film, where the sets tend to overwhelm the human figures. And the ending, with its explosion followed by a rather wispy mushroom cloud, is a little too obviously an attempt to bring a story written during World War I into the atomic era. Some think it's a masterpiece, but I would just rank it as essential Welles -- which may or may not be the same thing.

Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)

Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) is insane, and Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) love each other more than either of them loves Catherine. That's obviously a reductive way of looking at the movies' most famous ménage à trois, but it's my takeaway from the most recent viewing of Truffaut's masterpiece. Why is Catherine insane? one should ask. Because she's a free spirit trapped in a woman's body when freedom for women can be glimpsed but not fully achieved. Note how liberated she becomes when she dresses as a man, smoking a stogie (pace Dr. Freud, but sometimes a cigar is more than just a cigar) and providing a light for a strange man outside of a pissoir. And at no time do Jules and Jim find her more sexually desirable, I think. Naturally, she marries Jules, the more repressed of the two, and finds further liberation by cheating on him rather than falling into the socially respectable roles of wife and mother. As for the "bromance" of Jules and Jim, that too skirts societal disapproval: The narrator tells us that their friendship was much talked about. Even separated by a war that puts them on opposing sides, each worries that he may find himself killing the other. But they survive, only to find Catherine testing their friendship. That it survives the test until Catherine kills one of them is the film's deepest irony. And Catherine is never able to find the freedom she seeks, even after death: Her desire to have her ashes scattered to the winds is thwarted by "the regulations," as the narrator (Michel Subor) tells us. It is, of course, one of the great films, made so by Moreau's tremendous performance, by Georges Delerue's score, and by Raoul Coutard's cinematography, but most of all by Truffaut's direction and (with Jean Gruault) endlessly fascinating script. Even Jules and Catherine's daughter, Sabine, is perfectly presented: Sabine Haudepin is one of the least affected, least annoying child performers ever to appear on screen.

A Woman Is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)

Jean-Claude Brialy and Anna Karina in A Woman Is a Woman

Émile Récamier: Jean-Claude Brialy
Angela: Anna Karina
Alfred Lubitsch: Jean-Paul Belmondo

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Bernard Evein
Music: Michel Legrand

Orson Welles is often quoted as having said, when he saw the production facilities available to him at RKO, "This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!" I imagine Jean-Luc Godard saying something like that when he was told that he could make his second feature film, after the success of Breathless (1960), in color and Franscope (an anamorphic wide-screen process like Cinemascope). But of course Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, had no intention of using the wide screen for its conventional purpose, the epic and spectacular. Instead, many of the tricks the director and the cinematographer pulled off in A Woman Is a Woman were playful ones, like filming the tiny, cramped apartment of Angela and Émile in a medium more suited to Versailles. The effect is not only slightly giddy, but it also serves to emphasize the difficulties the couple are having in their relationship. The movie is brightly inconsequential, the kind of colorful musicalized nonsense that Jacques Demy would master a few years later with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), using the same composer Godard does, Michel Legrand. The success of Breathless seems to have gone to Godard's head a bit: He enlists its star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, as the third leg of the movie's romantic triangle, and has him speak a line about not wanting to miss Breathless on TV. Belmondo also encounters Jeanne Moreau in a cameo bit, asking her how Jules and Jim is going -- Godard's fellow New Wave sensation, François Truffaut, was in the midst of filming it with Moreau. The best thing A Woman Is a Woman has going for it is Karina, who was about to become Godard's muse and for a while his wife.