The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 12-18
Moderato Cantabile (1960)
Directed by Peter Brook
Adapted from the eponymous novel by Marguerite Duras by one of the veritable geniuses of 20th century theatre, “Moderato Cantabile” is Brook’s own personal contribution to that over-romanticized chapter of French cinema people refer to as the Nouvelle Vague. While a lot of the New Wave, especially those films by its most celebrated exponents, was banality camouflaged in quirky guises, Moderato Cantabile is a somber excavation into the psychological complexity of a singular relationship. A working man (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and a well-to-do woman (Jeanne Moreau) are brought together, so to speak, by a murder they both witness. The film is built and rests upon the intangible tension that brings the two characters closer while simultaneously pulling them apart. The phony romanticism that plagued the French New Wave with an epidemic of clichés is here eradicated by Brook’s direction. Defying any possible expectation, Moderato Cantabile is a timeless film, the work of a man whose erudition is so profound that it doesn’t even show. Giovanni Vimercati (October 12, 7:15pm, 9:15pm at BAM’s Brook series)