Actresses: Making the Most of Love

(8 of 10)

Moreau is a sensualist surrounded by intellectuals, but lately she has begun to sound like a sage. "I just started talking a short time ago," she says earnestly. "Before that I listened—it was my period of silence." The search for love continues, but it no longer totally dominates her. Moreau has always been greatly influenced by the man in her life; she aims to please, and her style and interests shift according to the taste of her friends. "I learn well from men," she admits. "Wouldn't my life be ridiculous if I didn't?"

"Jeanne is the reconciliation of the romantic and the modern," says Duras. "In love, she subordinates herself entirely to men; yet she holds her life and her career in her own hands. Professionally she is quite alone." This is not to say that her career doesn't depend on love: to be happy, to work, she still needs romance. "Many people fall in love with her," says Mastroianni. "I did. And she loves you in return. But just till the end of the film. She is always searching for love. And she leaves victims along the roadside."

But not many—and are they really victims? Most of the men Moreau has loved retain a place in her affections. "I would like to have a really big house," she says, dreaming like a child, "where I could live with a man I loved, and where there'd be enough space for every man I'd ever loved in the past to have a room to himself, and we'd all live there together."

A droll idea, but she does spend much of her time working with past lovers and old friends. She took parts in Orson Welles's The Trial and his forthcoming film about Falstaff out of simple admiration for Welles. She just finished making Mata Hari for her ex-husband and is making Viva Maria! for Malle, who couldn't get the production financed without her name on the contract. The present man in her life is Paris Couturier Pierre Cardin, and she dresses almost exclusively in clothes from his salon; they're lovely clothes, of course, but as a mannequin, she's worth millions.

Inviting as it is, Moreau's view of love has not made her happy; there is, as the observant Mastroianni notes, "an emptiness in her," and her acting reveals the urgency of her attempt to fill it. "If I weren't an actress," she says, "I would have been a hysteric." Only once has she performed in a film she couldn't bring herself to care about —Martin Ritt's disgraceful Five Branded Women, which she made one year when she fell behind in her income tax. In all the others, no matter how inconsequential some of them have been, Moreau has been totally engaged.

As a result, Moreau is commonly the only excuse for the movies she's in. Bay of Angels is flimsy and false, but Moreau's portrayal of a bleached and battered chippy whose universe is the gambling casino is an essay on compulsion. Banana Peel has all the makings of a conventional comedy-thriller, but Moreau and Belmondo turned their trifling roles into a virtuoso embroidery of refined comic techniques.