Mélo

A film set in Paris at the end of the 1920s. Pierre plays violin in an orchestra. He is a good musician but his career has stopped somewhere and he has accepted it. Romaine is his wife. They have a quiet life; a small house, a garden, dinners. Marcel is an old school friend. A famous soloist; he travels the world giving concerts and comes to dinner one evening. The dinner opens the film and runs nearly twenty minutes. Marcel tells a story, and the rest of the lives of the three people at that table is decided in it. An affair begins between Romaine and Marcel. From there the film becomes a story of lying. A pretext of a journey, hidden letters, a doctor and a bottle of medicine. Romaine cannot leave her husband. It is not that she does not love him; she simply wants both lives, and both are not possible. What the narrative is interested in is not adultery but conscience: the woman's having no way out is built as a moral question and the film does not treat it as a crime. The form is entirely theatrical. Scenes are divided by curtains, the sets are painted, the number of locations is very small, and the actors speak in the language of the stage. That is a choice. The source is a play from 1929, and rather than turning the text into cinema Resnais wants it to remain theatre. The dialogue is written in the language of the period and has not been simplified at all. There is a confession scene in the last section. Two old friends talk in a room and the narrative piles all its weight there. Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, Fanny Ardant and André Dussollier are in the cast. Alain Resnais directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes theatrical cinema and classical melodrama. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the acting is deliberately heightened and the falseness of the sets is plain in every scene.