Actresses: Making the Most of Love

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"Don't Search." Moreau's film acting is mainly visual: what she says always tells less than what she does. In the small dimension of the modern film, with its total emphasis on interior values, a subtle vocabulary of gesture and expression is crucial to any good actor. What makes Moreau uniquely convincing is how little she does to accomplish so much: she smiles warmly at the husband she is about to betray—but haven't her eyes changed focus? She obediently lends herself to her master's fetishes in Luis Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid, but the chill hints of resignation that cross her face prove a heart full of nausea and disdain. "You don't have to act in front of a camera," she says. "You just have to be concerned."

Still, she was trained in the classic tradition of the French theater, with its insistence that the whole gamut of roles, from Molière to Montherlant, be mastered, and that the thousand niceties of acting, from beau geste to rhétorique, become ingrained. She has no patience with actors whose concern exceeds their craft: "Burt Lancaster! Before he can pick up an ashtray, he discusses his motivation for an hour or two. You want to say just pick up the ashtray and shut up."

Having mastered her own craft, Moreau now prefers to become engaged with her films without dwelling much on their significance. "One should never search for meaning in a script," she says. "When the work is over, the meaning comes out by itself." With her maquilleuse, Simone Knapp, she studies her script for makeup, hairdos and costume changes; the two of them have worked together so long that they can plan a whole film in 45 minutes. Then she reads over her lines to get the drift of things and puts her script aside until the shooting starts. The wait invariably makes her nervous. "When I was young," she says, "I was always sure of everything I did. I was sure the audience would love me, and I had to be dragged away from a stage. Now I know more, and sometimes I have awful periods of stage fright."

Burlesque Boxing. Moreau's constant fear is that "the inside will be stronger than the outside," that she will not be capable of physically expressing her approach to the character she will play. She broods over the character she is about to become, and as the metamorphosis begins, she often comes up with ideas and feelings that far exceed the ambitions of the film.

Thus with Viva Maria!, which aims at being little more than a fancifully photographed tale of two turn-of-the-century dance-hall girls who cheer up a Latin American revolution, Moreau saw a chance of expressing one of her firmest beliefs. "Films have never shown the kind of relationship that can exist between two women," she says. "Men like to think that women must be constantly jealous of each other, never trusting, never in rapport. That is not true, of course, certainly not today. This film could show that."