Phantom of Liberty
IN A REVIEW OF MARGUERITE DURAS’S 1958 NOVEL MODERATO CANTABILE FOR Libération, Claude Roy declared that the author was “determined to bring to bear on the world and its inhabitants a gaze as detached and objective as that of a camera lens.” In another review, Dominique Aury invoked the structuring negativity of Duras’s groundbreaking narrative style: “She says much by saying little. She exerts force by way of evasion. She forms a kind of vacuum into which all that is neither described nor named rushes irresistibly, announces itself, bursts forth with its own self-evidence.” Just two years later, the screen adaptation penned by Duras herself was released in France; from its conception, the film was to star Jeanne Moreau in the lead role of Anne Desbarèdes.
Moreau started out on the stage, and was inducted into the Comédie-Française at only 20 years old. By the in 1960, she had already worked with several icons of postwar French cinema, most notably Louis Malle, for whom in 1958 she gave a pair of breakout performances, in and . Yet at 32 years old, she had yet to bring to life many of her most iconic characters, in such monumental auteur-driven projects as , , , and .
