This spring, surrender to the fierce intelligence, sultry sensuality, and complexity of one of arthouse cinema’s greatest dames – Jeanne Moreau.
Moreau epitomised European cinema in the 1960s and 70s. She embodied the protagonists of scripts by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Genet, starring in masterpieces by François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
She played diverse roles that subverted gender expectations, including a woman who abandons her husband and daughter for a younger man in The Lovers (1959), an alienated wife drifting through a crumbling marriage in La Notte (1961), and a woman complicit in murder wandering anxiously through the streets of Paris in Lift to the Scaffold (1958). Across her career she inhabited characters who refused easy categorisation or moral judgement.
With misogynistic flair, critics at the time called her ‘jolie-laide’ (pretty-ugly), yet she radiated maturity, and an atypical sensuality in an era fixated on youth and wide-eyed innocence. When she rose to international stardom with Lift to the Scaffold and Jules et Jim (1962), she already had 19 films under her belt and extensive theatre training – a far cry from a malleable debutante. Perhaps this is what drew these auteurs to her: a modern femme fatale – intelligent, messy, and empowered to self-destruct. This side of her is perfectly demonstrated in Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963), where her character’s compulsive gambling leads a man to destruction.
Audiences often associate Moreau with the sombre mood of film noir, but she showed remarkable versatility as well as a daring playfulness. As a schoolteacher-arsonist in Mademoiselle (1966) and a widow-turned-avenger in The Bride Wore Black (1968), she channelled rage into violence. Yet she could pivot just as easily to comedy and subversion: sparring with Brigitte Bardot in the feminist western Viva Maria! (1965), presiding with camp authority over a bordello in Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982), or delivering a deliciously kinky turn in Buñuel’s bourgeois satire Diary of a Chambermaid (1964).
A cinematic force who refused to play by the rules – discover her for yourself at The Garden Cinema.
