On s'est connus: Jeanne Moreau

I think of this as the iconic Moreau look. Bare face, cat eyes, unfussy hair, and the plainest little black dress.

Sometime in my teens (was it when I started studying French in college?), my mom decided we needed to watch Jules and Jim. Mom said she'd seen it years earlier but "the only thing I remember about it is that she sings a little song with a guitar."

"She" was Jeanne Moreau, of course, and the song was "Le Tourbillon," a perfect little grace note of suspended time in the middle of this perfect, daring, how-the-fuck-did-Truffaut-pull-this-off-before-he-was-thirty film.

I think of this as my introduction to Jeanne Moreau, though I guess technically I'd seen her as the old lady in the frame story of Ever After, her distinctive voice grown gravelly with time and lending a gravitas to the film's final lines that you don't often find in children's fairy-tale films.

But in the years to come, she became my favorite French actress. She was intense and sexy and had a piercing kind of intelligence. She was never an ingenue (the early-career glossy publicity photos where she tries to look like a '50s ingenue are kind of hilarious). She was always a fully grown, if petite, woman who needed the rougher edges of the French New Wave, handheld cameras and minimal makeup and intelligent scripts and complex characters. She did her best work after she was thirty. She had Resting Sad Face (like me). She had a tart little voice, like green apples, and even recorded some other jazz-pop songs besides "Le Tourbillon." The Lovers, a movie she made in 1958 that included a nude love scene, eventually prompted the famous U.S. Supreme Court case where Justice Potter Stewart ruled "That's not obscene, I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it." She was the first woman elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts. (Although, as praiseworthy as that is, it's also kind of shameful that it took until 2001 to break that glass ceiling.) She was Maggie the Cat in the French premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and can you even imagine?

I watch her movies and I want to take up smoking and wander around cities at night being intense and brooding and melancholy and restless and dissatisfied. One thing I think we don't talk about enough is how there are a lot of male stars who embody a disaffected, brooding quality, but among women, there's pretty much only Jeanne Moreau. Women, too, sometimes want to be romantic existentialists. Women, too, want film-star icons who were uncompromising and iconoclastic, lonely and proud.

I did feel a physical shock on reading the news that she died but, if I take a step back, I mean... she was 89. She worked with the best filmmakers of her era. She smoked like a chimney and made it to the end of her ninth decade on Earth. I sang "Le tourbillon" in the shower this morning. RIP et adieu, Mme Moreau.

Whirlpools

It's late, so another video tonight: "Le tourbillon de la vie," sung by Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim.

My mom rented this movie for me the summer after my freshman year of college--I had a year's worth of French under my belt, so she thought it was something I ought to see.

"I saw this movie once, years ago, and I don't remember anything about it," my mom said as she put the disc into the DVD player, "except that at one point Jeanne Moreau sings a little song with a guitar."

After watching the movie, I understood what my mother meant. Because this song is unforgettable.

JEANNE MOREAU LE TOURBILLON DE LA VIE
Uploaded by kirivalse.

It is a perfect two minutes of film--all the more so because of its imperfections. Moreau sings the wrong lyrics at one point, and later she dips her head so her mouth nearly moves out of frame. But I love that Truffaut chose to use this take, rather than one that seemed less natural and spontaneous.

I'm posting this today because Jeanne Moreau is my new favorite actress and so this song has been running through my head. And also, I think it goes well with the Brel song I posted yesterday, for reasons that I am having a hard time articulating. Well, so "le tourbillon de la vie" means "the whirlpool of life," and the lyrics describe a never-ending cycle of an on-again off-again relationship. And even if you don't know French, you can hear that the music of it is circular too, going round and round. Because it's a perfect moment, you imagine you could go on listening to it forever, its endless circularity.

And the Brel "Valse à Mille Temps" is a circular song too--it's about a dance, the waltz, where you whirl around and around; the music churns and repeats; the lyrics have to do with the cycle of growing up and falling in love; Brel performs it while spinning on a merry-go-round. (In the American musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris, this song got translated as "We're On a Carousel.") So I get a similar feeling when listening to both these songs--like there is some wisdom buried within them, though they may seem like mere little ditties on a first hearing. And I've been wondering why these circular chansons affect me so deeply, and feel so profound.

A Moreau moment

The other day, when I envisioned a Chanel biopic made in the 1950s or '60s with Jeanne Moreau in the lead, I was mainly thinking of how Moreau and Chanel share a certain uncompromising, implacable quality (which is not a quality one associates with Audrey Tautou)...

Little did I know that Chanel was one of Moreau's favorite designers, that there are photos of them together in Chanel's famous apartment...

...and that even today, Moreau maintains her association with the couture house, narrating an audio guide for a Chanel exhibition and appearing in a video on the Chanel website where she gives a tour of this apartment (go here and click on #2).

I am actually in a Jeanne Moreau phase at the moment--it started when I watched Viva Maria on Comcast last week. No offense meant to Brigitte Bardot, Moreau's Viva Maria costar, who is of course beautiful and delightful. But in general, I am never as fascinated by bubbly and exuberant Bardot types as I am by women like Moreau--whose eyes held an infinite sadness and wisdom and seen-it-all quality even when she was only in her thirties.

When I grow up I want to be an intense French woman. Chic and opinionated, passionate but unsentimental. Like Moreau. Like Chanel. Like Natalie Dessay. Like my host mothers in Paris and Bordeaux. Not altogether like Edith Piaf, whose life was too painful for anyone to covet; but like her, like all these women, in taking Je ne regrette rien as a motto!

Coco and Catherine

Last week I went to see Coco Before Chanel. It didn't get fantastic reviews, but I was having one of those days where I just needed to hear French spoken and see pretty dresses, and on those counts, it satisfied. While a less ambitious movie than La Vie En Rose (the last biopic I saw about a Great French Woman) it was also less frustrating--I think biographical movies work better when they focus on a short period of the person's life, rather than going birth-to-death.

And there is one moment that is truly great cinema. You almost don't need the rest of the movie; this one shot says it all. Coco goes dancing at a seaside casino, where all of the other women are dressed in Edwardian finery: white and ivory fabrics, S-bend corsets, lots of lace and ruffles and delicate little details. Coco has been complaining about this style of dress for the whole movie, even though, to our modern eyes, it has its charm: the dresses are luxurious and beautifully made, and it pleases the eye to see a whole roomful of women dressed in similar fashions, waltzing with tuxedoed swains. But as the camera zooms in on Coco, the problem with all the other women's clothes suddenly becomes clear. It's not that they are ugly, it's that they are hopelessly old-fashioned. For Coco is wearing the simplest little black evening gown, sleeveless and slender, and she puts the others to shame. And you could wear this dress to a party in 2009 and still be the chicest woman in the room--long after the other women's dresses have been relegated to Halloween and masquerades.

The movie shows that Chanel's main innovation was to take inspiration from men's clothing: tweed trousers and fisherman jerseys and a flat black straw hat (the item that brings her her first success, but I thought it looked shabby and awkward). Thinking about this afterward, I was reminded of another French movie heroine: Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in Jules and Jim. The two movies take place in the same time period, and they share the theme of a young woman frustrated with the limitations her society places on her, and torn between two men. Coco, of course, manages to become self-actualized; Catherine only self-destructs.

But it was the similar fashions that made me connect these two characters, and wonder if the costume designer of Jules and Jim had taken inspiration from early Chanel designs when creating Catherine's wardrobe.

Both Coco and Catherine favor loose, non-constricting clothing to match their free-spirited personalities (Catherine may be a femme fatale, but she doesn't dress like one). They are both fond of a classic striped jersey...



...or a nice plaid...



...and of course, they both dress up in men's clothes, enjoying the freedom they are otherwise denied.



I wonder how the young Jeanne Moreau would have been in the role of Coco Chanel? My French friend, Sophie, said she's avoiding Coco Before Chanel because she thinks Audrey Tautou is absolutely the wrong actress for the role. She says I should look out for another Chanel movie that is being released soon, called Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, starring Anna Mouglalis. I am not familiar with Mouglalis' work, but Sophie assures me that she's virtually a Chanel look-alike and will do an excellent job.