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A Mai-Décembre Romance, Rekindled OnscreenBy Marcelle Clements At once merciless and deeply admiring, the portrait shows Duras struggling with alcohol, hospitalization, paranoia, dementia, grandiosity, futility and eventually death — yet retaining her childlike susceptibility to the charms of daily life. Directed by Josée Dayan and opening Wednesday in New York, "Cet Amour-Là" ("That Kind of Love") startles not by depicting an eccentric relationship but by baring the crazed compulsion of the creative drive. Yann Andrea was a philosophy student when he succumbed to the spell of Duras's writing. They met in 1975, when she gave a talk at his school, and then began to correspond (he sometimes wrote several letters a day). Five years later, suicidally depressed, Mr. Andrea came to see Duras at her seaside apartment. He would never leave her, remaining as muse, typist, nurse and lover for 16 years, until her death in 1996. Duras, who had stopped drinking but had been creatively blocked before Mr. Andrea moved in with her, returned to both alcohol and fiction, producing some of her most eloquent work, including perhaps her best novel, "The Lover." She also coerced Mr. Andrea (played in "Cet Amour-Là" by Aymeric Demarigny) out of his despair. Or, as she puts it in the film: "You don't have to kill yourself. You can write." When Ms. Moreau read Mr. Andrea's 1999 book, she says, she immediately felt it should be a film. "At first I was interested in it in a People magazine kind of way," she recalled during a visit to New York earlier this month. She and Duras had once been friends, and they had worked together on several movies. Although they later drifted apart, Ms. Moreau had of course heard about the scandalous Duras-Andrea affair. "I remember thinking, `Marguerite!' " she says. But reading the novel was different. "I was gripped by it — I couldn't stop," she recalls, speaking in French. Ms. Moreau brought the project to Ms. Dayan. Although she has made scores of films for French television and cinema, Ms. Dayan says, she felt as if "Cet Amour-Là" were her first. "I became fascinated and obsessed by this tale of fascination and obsession," she says. "It's the most personal movie I've ever made. And it never could have been made with anyone but Jeanne Moreau." For many cinephiles, Ms. Moreau is the archetypal French actress, beloved of film noir directors and New Wave auteurs — and just about everyone else. Among her best-known films are François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim" and "The Bride Wore Black" and Roger Vadim's "Dangerous Liaisons." She also worked with Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, Luc Besson and Wim Wenders, among others, and some of her most celebrated roles — as Anne Desbardes in "Moderato Cantabile," for example, directed by Peter Brook — were Duras heroines. Like them, Ms. Moreau's heroines were dangerously passionate yet discreet, erotically awakened but totally unsentimental. Sometimes in despair, sometimes merely in the state of terminal ennui that often leads to infidelity, they nevertheless managed to be at once sensual and incredibly cool. Like Duras, Ms. Moreau was known for daring demonstrations of just how sexy a really smart woman could be. Ms. Moreau's longtime fans will agree that her on-screen Duras is at least as audacious as her role in "The Lovers," the beautiful 1958 film that brought her and the director Louis Malle international notoriety. A long "oooohhhh" was heard in the theater when the famous orgasm scene was shown on screen before French audiences. (In this country, it was banned in several states.) The parallel moment in "Cet Amour-Là," at the screening I attended, was when the audience gasped at the very first shot of her, in thick-lensed glasses and a man-tailored shirt, devoid of youth or seduction. The insistent closeups of the couple's claustrophobic entanglement, and their sometimes primitive psychological combat, seem all the more disturbing because they alternate with odd moments of pure whimsy: walks on the beach, dancing at the seaside cafe. "Cet Amour-Là" shows us every sidelong glance the older woman directs at the younger man. We watch her drain her glass of wine, lick her lips, wipe her mouth with her hand. We wish to look away when she insults him. "You're a nothing!" she often reminds him. Off screen, Ms. Moreau is charming, intense, often funny. Wearing tight jeans and a long warm sweater, she is getting over a cold, suffering from laryngitis. She smokes anyway. Her gaze is steady and penetrating. When she wants to make sure you are paying attention, she says, "You see?" Her famous, gravelly voice sometimes drops to an eerie whisper, as if speaking louder might distract from the scene she is recreating for her interlocutor. Her extraordinary vigor and youthful body belie her age — she was born in 1928. I ask if there are many love stories about people above a certain age that should be told. "In movies?" she responds. "I don't think that's interesting. This one is an exceptional case — an exceptional woman, an exceptional encounter. Here we have a story about a woman and a man and a typewriter. A woman reconnecting with her creativity. Where does that come from?" Perhaps it comes from the fact that to be desired renews one's interest in life. "Yes," acknowledges Ms. Moreau, "but what was desired was what was coming from her — her writing. She was smart enough to know it wasn't her behind." She whispers: "Do you see? It's something else. Something magic, supernatural." She lights yet another cigarette. "I am willing to play a woman in love — but only if she's a mystic. I'd be willing to take to the road, like St. Theresa of Avila. Now that interests me." Ms. Moreau did not base her portrayal on her own recollections of Duras. "My mind became blank," she said. "I couldn't remember Marguerite at all, not her face, not even her voice. What I did was read and reread her books. She always had this egocentrism which suddenly overwhelmed me." She whispers: "Because I said to myself, `It's so difficult to write, it's so difficult, this path you've chosen.' How does one live with it? When you have no choice? When you know that if you don't write you'll die?" Ms. Moreau has been trying to work on a book of her own, but has found it very difficult. "It's like a gold thread that can be broken," she says, "and then you're back to the blank page." Gentle and elegant, she is far different from the Duras she portrays. Was she frightened at first to inhabit this declining, ravenous woman? "Ah no," she says."I'm never frightened. Never." Never anxious? Apprehensive? "Maybe the first day, there's some tension on the set. But then it's as if I were monitored. There's no thinking, no reflection — as if some force went through me and says" — she whispers now, leaning forward — "No, it must be this way, not that. . . ." I wait. So does she, gaze fixed in the middle distance. "Well, it's what's called splitting," she says, straightening and leaning back. "Stanislavsky talked about this. It's a real schizophrenia. In the split state you know the other is there and that prevents you from falling into a pit or tripping on a cable." She laughs to hear that one hadn't expected to hear Jeanne Moreau speak of Stanislavsky. "Me neither," she says. It was only last year that she came across a few of his books. She read them with pleasurable recognition. Trained in the theater, she long regarded movies as her day job. Ms. Moreau works intuitively. "An actor's energy! That gives me pleasure. And that's what I'm like. Even if I am quiet. It's only on the face. In front of the camera, there's energy, burning energy." No, she says, she doesn't spend time wondering about the future, or about illness or death. "I never think of it, even if I have more years behind me than ahead. It's a passage, like birth." But what of experiencing her character's death? "I felt things were going through me that were unknown; but they were for the film. Not reality." And madness? "That's something I know very well." She's almost inaudible. "It's very familiar to me." While shooting "Cet Amour-Là," there were times, she says, when she was "not fun." She continued: "I was obsessed. Obsessed! Sometimes I would call Yann and say: `You're so brutal. It's not right.' And he'd say: `But she was, too. You can't imagine what I endured.' " Did it sometimes seem as if she had fallen into a chasm it would be hard to climb out of? "Oh, no. I knew I'd get out. But I knew I had to go all the way. That it was a question of honor — to give their due to all these women who write." Asked if her feelings about Duras had changed by the time the movie was finished, she said, "No, I felt a very great tenderness." She finds requests to draw real-life parallels with her characters tedious: it would be "mortally boring," she says, merely to reproduce her life in her roles. But as it happens, she, too, has had young lovers. "I've always liked younger men," she says. "Men my age, except for a few, smell of the indoors. They've succeeded and made a lot of money or lost a lot, and they have a relationship to women based on that. Their ideas are ready-made, and there's a relationship with power. Or else they're hypochondriacal and thinking of their own death. And if a woman is a little intelligent they flee from her as if she had the plague. There's nothing to learn, nothing to teach them. Whereas I have the feeling of being a perpetual student. "I have more fun with 20- or 25-year-old boys. We talk, we argue. They need something I can help with — the choice of a school, or what job to get." She lights a cigarette. "Except for geniuses," she adds. "Geniuses or young men." She gestures. "I always have the impression that I am in the midst of becoming. Even if it's my death that's becoming. It's in process. It's not over." Marcelle Clement's novel "Midsummer" will be published in May by Harcourt. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
