Seven Days… Seven Nights

Seven Days… Seven Nights (1960)

Moderato cantabile

Anne Desbarèdes is a young woman who is married to a wealthy businessman and lives a monotonous existence in the small commune town of Blaye. After indirectly witnessing a murder in a café, she returns to the scene of the crime the next day and meets Chauvin, who informs her in more detail about the events that took place. Mentally unbalanced, Anne begins to believe that Chauvin intends to kill her.

Date of release
1960-05-25
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (44)
Runtime
1h 31m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Peter Brook

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Moderato Cantabile
  • Filmed in: Blaye

Seven Days... Seven Nights is a 1960 French drama film directed by Peter Brook. It was entered into the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, where Jeanne Moreau won the award for Best Actress. The film is based on the 1958 novel Moderato cantabile by Marguerite Duras.

Production

Marguerite Duras novella Moderato cantabile was published in 1958. Peter Brook secured the film rights and wanted to offer the lead role to Jeanne Moreau, whom he had directed in a Paris production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

However, Brook's only other film, The Beggar's Opera, had been a box-office flop and he found difficulty raising money. According to a newspaper report, "after almost a year of financial, artistic and emotional blackmail and diplomacy, Raoul Levy undertook to produce the film for love."

Levy described the film as "a romantic suspense story that only uses two principals. I guess that you could say that, through the basis of a passive love story, we learn how a crime of passion was committed."

Levy wanted Simone Signoret to play the female lead, but Brook wanted Moreau, and by contract Brook, Moreau and Duras enjoyed complete artistic control. Brook admitted that this was "very unusual" but insisted that the film needed "assured and delicate" handling to succeed.

Brook says that Levy did not understand the script but "was convinced that if Brook, Moreau and Duras saw something in it, something must be there." Levy did not show the script to potential financiers; instead, he told them: "Look here, you turned down The 400 Blows because you couldn't understand the script, you turned down Hiroshima Mon Amour; well, I can't make head nor tail of this script and what's more I'm not even going to show it to you…

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended