Inauguration of the Femme fatale. Tribute to Jeanne Moreau showcase, with the screening of Eva by Joseph Losey.

Following the success of the showcases offered by the Mario Gromo Library/Mediatheque over the past months – the tributes to Alain Delon, to Romy Schneider and to French polar – we are staying in the ambit of French cinema for December, by offering a mini-showcase featuring two films dedicated to the French actress, singer and filmmaker Jeanne Moreau, who recently passed away, titled Femme fatale. The showcase is being inaugurated by the screening of Eva by Joseph Losey.

Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017) was one of the most emblematically versatile performers in French cinema, at ease with complex roles as much as very different ones from each other. The actress was able to brand each one with a decisive nuance of her own, a mark capable of surrounding the character she embodied with an aura characterised by mystery, by allure and by a sort of elusive intangibility, a yardstick of her interpreting a new, modern, restless femininity, not easily corralled up into a stereotype.

A few months after this great actress’s demise, the Mario Gromo Library/Mediatheque is proposing two specific occasions in which Moreau is in the shoes of an atypical femme fatale: Joseph Losey’s Eva (a film in which she embodies a female ideal capable of taking men to self-destruction) and The bride wore black by François Truffaut (where she is in the role of a fascinating avenger of her husband, who was killed on their wedding-day).

All screenings are admission free until full seating capacity is reached, subject to free membership registration to the Library/Mediatheque and presenting an identity document.

Monday 4 December, 3.30 p.m.

Joseph Losey

Eva

(France-Italy 1962, 116’, b/w)

Tyvian Jones is a writer who has achieved success with a broadly plagiarised novel. Whilst in Venice to promote his book and to announce a  film will be drawn from it, he meets the seductive and enigmatic Eva. Fascinated by the woman, he starts an affair with her, which will see him as the victim of several, fierce humiliations. Hoping to free himself from this insane passion, Jones marries young Francesca, who soon realises her husband is still enslaved by Eva and commits suicide. The man faces a dangerous obsessive drift, under the illusion that Eva will come back to him.

With Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, Giorgio Albertazzi

Monday 18 December, 3.30 p.m.

François Truffaut

The bride wore black (La mariée était en noir)

(France-Italy 1968, 107’, col.)

A wager among five friends busy testing a precision rifle involuntarily causes the death of David, as the latter comes out of church on the day of his wedding with Julie. Bound to the memory of her husband, the woman has the firm purposeful intention of avenging his death. She thus rolls out a plan which leads her to approach the men she considers directly responsible for her beloved’s death, subsequently killing them in constantly differing ways. She has already eliminated four men, when she realises the last person on her list is in jail: she therefore decides to turn herself in and to get imprisoned, in order to complete her revenge.

With Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Bouquet, Charles Denner