Enduring screen stars in their latter years can react in various ways to the dimming of a youth that was once venerated on the screen. Some can become crusty or complacent, content to offer a doughty version of what they became famous for, while other can find a lightness and freedom that comes with certainty and experience; think of Paul Newman in Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool. The best, however, add to their body of work, working on principles they’ve made their own during decades in the cinema.
Moreau would never dare make a play for sympathy
That’s certainly the case with Jeanne Moreau, who inhabits completely the part of an ageing Parisian at odds with those around her in Ilmar Raag’s A Lady in Paris. The two-hander begins with Anne (Laine Magi), divorced from an oafish husband and caring for her ailing mother in Estonia. When Anne loses her last parent she’s both upset and alone – her children are loving but have their own lives – so she agrees to come to France to care for Frida (Moreau), a long-time Estonian expatriate who needs assistance. She is at once trying to recreate the circumstances she knows and seeking a new beginning.
Frida, however, does not care for Anne, or virtually anyone else. She only wants Stephane (Patrick Pineau), a younger former lover who is now middle-aged and still tied to Frida by a combination of the restaurant she gifted him to run and his own dutiful instincts. Stephane’s instructions to Anne are to prepare Frida’s meals and hold onto the key for the medicine cabinet, for whether out of the need for attention or relief the 80something grande dame in silk pajamas has already overdosed on pills once before.
Not surprisingly, the relationship between the two begins badly and slowly improves. Frida has both the rage of a thwarted child and the disdain of someone who has seen it all. She criticises everything from Anne’s attire to the croissants she serves for breakfast. Moreau is both imperious and giving in this performance, and once Frida begins to impart a sense of her life to Anne her uncivil behaviour acquires a degree of explanation and the authenticity of a life’s expansive moments.
But neither the filmmaker nor the actress tries to soften Frida’s manner. When Anne invites members of an expatriate Estonian choir that Frida sang with as a young woman just arrived in Paris to afternoon tea, the initially cordial meeting swiftly lapses into old recriminations. Frida is cutting and unconcerned, dismissing them with the rebuke that she has 'a clear conscience". Moreau would never dare make a play for sympathy, instead finding a survivor’s pathos in her character’s final days, especially when Frida visits Stephane’s restaurant to survey what was once her domain.
Earlier this year the Australian Centre for the Moving Image held a deserved Jeanne Moreau retrospective, and while A Lady in Paris is unassuming in places, content to take stock of Anne slowly warming to the currents of the French capital, the prickly charm of Moreau’s performance is a first-rate addition to her six-decade long career. In a way, Frida could be a reprise of her title character from Joseph Losey’s Eva, a most capricious courtesan 50 years on, but A Lady in Paris possesses a star who never has to rely on mere nostalgia.
