Beginning this week at the Pacific Film Archive, a series highlighting the career of French actress Jeanne Moreau, whom director Orson Welles once called “the greatest actress in the world,” will run until December 11. The series kicks off tonight, Thursday, November 3, with “Bay of Angels,” a 1962 film directed by Jacques Demy where Moreau plays a gambler ready to throw in the chips.
Moreau rose to prominence with her performance as Florence in Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller “Elevator to the Gallows,” which is most famous for Miles Davis’s impressionist score. This film marries the more fluid French New Wave technique to the fixed genre of noir. “Gallows” is one part of an excellent Malle/Moreau double bill on Friday, November 4, as it precedes Malle’s other 1958 masterpiece, “The Lovers.” The latter is one of the most scandalous films of the ’50s, as its lurid yet naturalist sex scenes were the controversy at much-famed obscenity trials, where the expression “I know it when I see it” originated.
With her elegantly curled lips, knowing eyes and ageless beauty, Moreau quickly became a desired object of auteur directors. She has worked with Antonioni (his elegiac 1961 “La Notte” will screen Saturday, November 26), Welles (his Kafka adaptation of “The Trial” screens in December), Bunuel and others. Moreau stars in two Truffaut films, which are included in this comprehensive series, and his must-see “Jules and Jim” will show on November 12. This is one of the flagship New Wave films, where Moreau plays a flighty free spirit embroiled in a love triangle between the titular men. “Jules and Jim” is easily credited for inventing a whole new kind of cinema aesthetic, and one that we see today in films that so earnestly try to replicate the esprit of the New Wave.
Even for Moreau neophytes, PFA’s “Jeanne Moreau: Enduring Allure” has plenty to offer the savvy cinephile hungry for the bygone days of movie magic.
Ryan Lattanzio is the lead film critic.
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