Our tribute season to France’s greatest New Wave actress, the beautiful Jeanne Moreau, opens with Louis Malle’s 1958 noir masterpiece Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and follows Moreau’s subsequent rise to stardom over a single, intense decade. Also screening is Malle’s Les amants (1958), a film that cemented Moreau’s star status and guaranteed her roles in some of the most important films made in the following decade.
In Les liaisons dangereuses (1959), Roger Vadim’s reworking of Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th-century novel, Moreau plays Juliette de Merteuil opposite Gérard Philipe’s Victome de Valmont. Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961) sees Moreau play the bored wife of Marcello Mastroianni, while in Jacques Demy’s La baie des anges (1963).
Moreau is cast as a gambling addict who abandons her family for the roulette tables of Nice. And in Luis Buñuel’s Le journal d’une femme de chambre (1964), Moreau stars as a domestic maid in provincial 1930s France who attempts to discover the murderer of a young girl.
The season also includes two films by François Truffaut. The famous Jules et Jim (1962) chronicles the relationship between two friends (played by Oscar Werner and Henri Serre) and the woman of their obsession (Moreau). Finally, the season ends with the thriller La mariée était en noir (1968), in which Moreau plays a woman seeking vengeance when her husband is murdered moments after their wedding.
Focus on Jeanne Moreau runs from Thursday 14 February – Tuesday 26 February 2013.
Tickets > Full $15, Concession $12, ACMI Member $11
Six-session pass > Full $72, Concession $60, ACMI Member $54
Visit the ACMI website for sessions dates and times.
ACMI Cinemas, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square,
Melbourne
