Grande dame

>> France’s Jeanne Moreau on her brilliant career and latest role as Marguerite Duras in Cet amour-là

by MATTHEW HAYS

Needless to say, it’s an unusual way to wake up at six in the morning. A phone call from none other than French big-screen icon Jeanne Moreau. But due to some tight scheduling, she’s only got an hour or so open from her Paris office.

Her voice sounds like gravel. But I can see her face clearly, filling the role of literary goddess Marguerite Duras beautifully in her latest film, Cet amour-là, a film about Duras’s final tortured relationship with Yann Andréa, a man decades her junior. But I’m also flashing back to her umpteenth other roles as the first lady of the French Nouvelle vague. After working as a rather obscure actress on the big screen for a decade, she was cast by Louis Malle in Ascenseur pour l’echafaud in ’57 and Les Amants in ’58, films that immediately gave her new respect in the film world. She’s since worked with what seems like everyone: Roger Vadim, Orson Welles, Marcel Ophuls, John Frankenheimer, Elia Kazan, R.W. Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Antonioni—these are but a few of the names that crowd her CV. As film critic Robert Pardi put it, Moreau was “adopted as a patron saint by Truffaut, Malle and Godard, and embraced by the intelligentsia as a love goddess who did not insult their IQs, Moreau followed the same course in her career as her characters did in their movies: wherever your heart leads you, never compromise once you reach the destination.”

Moreau on Marguerite

For Moreau, filling the role of Duras was not daunting at all. “We had known each other well from about 1958 until 1973,” says Moreau. “And then, you know, sometimes people lose touch. Not because of a falling out, they just lose touch.”

The project came about, Moreau explains, after she was approached to do a series of readings from Andrea’s book about his 16-year relationship with the famous author. “We chose certain scenes to read in a small theatre. We did the readings in front of various people. When I got home I thought to myself, ‘My god, this could make a beautiful film.’ It really struck me as an incredible relationship, a truly non-classical one. I saw great character writing.”

Then came the toughest part for Moreau: approaching Andrea himself. “It took me a while to have the guts to talk to him. And I spoke with him about working with [director] Josée [Dayan], who I love working with. She worked for TV and everything she’d done had been very successful, so there was some suspicion there. That’s the way French people are: the more successful you are, the more people have doubts about your talent. It’s amazing. But then they said yes, and after that, finding a producer was easy.”

A literate interpretation

As for preparing to play Duras, Moreau says “there was nothing worrying about taking it on. I read all of her books over again. I read her shorter works for the first time. I didn’t try to imitate her as that would have been an insult to both her and myself. When you’re an artist, you create. It’s like when there’s a flower, with a really strong fragrance, say, like a lily. When there’s a lily you don’t want to look like a lily but bring out to the audience the memory of what this fragrance was. It was easy, really, through her writing.”

It was no different playing someone she actually knew, insists Moreau. “At the end of the day I would think about Marguerite. I was speaking to her, I would say, ‘You devil!’ Sometimes I would cry and I would phone up Yann and say, ‘You were too hard on her.’ And he would say yes, sometimes he was, but she was tough. He said he regretted being so tough on her sometimes.”

Of Truffaut, with whom Moreau collaborated on the classic Jules et Jim, the actress has an odd recollection. “When I met Truffaut he had a way of feeding himself that always amazed me. We used to meet once a week in a restaurant that doesn’t exist any more near the Champs Elysées. He used to order the same thing: rare steak, that steak tartar. With French fries. He had big pimples all over his face because he ate raw meat all the time. Besides that, he never spoke during the meal. I was the one who spoke, jabbering away. The day after I would receive a long letter with his side of the conversation.”

After a film career this full, does Moreau have any regrets? “I did turn down Kubrick’s Spartacus. I also turned down Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. But what can you do?” Could Moreau have ever seen herself doing something else with her life? “Directing, maybe writing. But I could have owned a restaurant. I’m a very good cook. I started when I was five. I can cook anything!” :

Cet amour-là opens Friday, April 19