Cinema: Adagio Funereo

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Moderate Cantabile is a French movie made by an Englishman, Director Peter Brook (Lord of the Flies). Surprisingly, it seems an authentic French movie; unhappily, it is not a very good one. Based on a novel by Marguerite Duras, Moderate retells the sad tale of Flaubert's Emma Bovary as a contemporary case. Poor Emma. She always was a dull little dame, but in 1857 she at least made a social point.

In Brook's film as in Flaubert's book, the heroine (Jeanne Moreau) lives in a French provincial town and is married to a prosperous and proper bourgeois who is even duller than she is. She is bored, she falls in love with a younger man (Jean-Paul Belmondo), she loses him. At this point, Flaubert's heroine kills herself. Brook's heroine, alas, owes rather less to Flaubert than she does to Freud. Her drama is not a tragedy of society but a crisis of identity. "She wants to live a life, anybody's life, even her own," her lover observes. Her undoing does not lead to death but to a death wish—"I wish you were dead," he rages, and she replies, "I am."

Moderate Cantabile might better have been titled Adagio Funereo; it is much too long, much too lugubriously languid. On the other hand, Director Brook's musical score—he developed it himself from a sonatina by Diabelli —is sensuous and tender. And Armand Thirard's photography is almost too dreamily lovely to believe. The film was actually shot at Blaye on the River Gironde, and in Thirard's frames, the big river, the wide land, the vast sky and the quiet clouds all seem to be shimmering mysteriously in the depths of a tremendous pearl.