LDV118

26 AU CINÉMA CE SOIR We meet Alain Cuny again, playing Jeanne Moreau’s husband, in Louis Malle’s The Lovers , made in 1958, two years before La Dolce Vita . Alain Cuny listens to the music of Brahms, the variation movement from the String Sextet no.1 – is there any music so suggestive of youth and virility? – in the knowledge that his wife is in the process of leaving him. And there’s nothing he can do about it. The obsessive, inexorable character of movement and therefore of time is a constant in all these great films and of course also in André Delvaux’s Rendez-vous à Bray . A clock marks off the hours. The screenplay is based on a short story by Julien Gracq, Le Roi Cophetua . I must admit that I was surprised by the ponderous style of the latter when I read it. This is a problem when one compares cinema and the written word: a screenplay is not literature. I’m especially happy to play the Intermezzi op.117 because this is the first time I’ve recorded Brahms. In Delvaux’s film, these pieces are closely associated with the characters and even the objects. They permeate a world that is sensual, secretive and ambiguous. This is the music of the unconscious. Just like Richard Wagner’s Elegie in Visconti’s film Ludwig . Of course, we’re in another universe here, but the purity of language – clearly evident in Brahms’s late piano works, which he called ‘lullabies of my sorrow’ – is astonishing in this short piece too. Though forgotten for decades, it foreshadows Tristan und Isolde . I see in it the sobriety and slow beauty of Romy Schneider’s acting in the face of the hopeless imprisonment of Ludwig II of Bavaria, played by Helmut Berger.