The Ennobling Quality Of Jeanne Moreau In Lift To The Scaffold

|Subscribe To The Great Acting Blog|

Orson Welles described Jeanne Moreau as the greatest actor in the world. Quite a recommendation. Here I examine Moreau’s performance in Louis Malle’s Lift To The Scaffold, and try to articulate what makes her such an essential actor.

By the time she made Lift To The Scaffold, Jeanne Moreau was already 30 years old, with a solid body of work behind her. Malle’s film, a noir-ish tale, about a wife and her lover [played with quiet competence by Maurice Ronet] who plan to murder her rich, industrialist husband and be together. Ronet shoots the husband with his own gun in his own office at the top of an office tower, then arranges to make it look like suicide. The idea is for Ronet to meet Moreau afterwards and then it’s happy days. Fatefully, the elevator in the tower is turned off for the weekend and Ronet gets trapped inside it while trying to make his getaway. Simultaneously, his car is stolen by a pair of young lovers. Moreau, while walking to meet Ronet, sees his car speed past with the girl leaning out of the window. The driver is obscured from her view and so Moreau assumes it’s Ronet, and he’s taken off with someone else. Moreau is crushed. What ensues, is one of the great pre-Nouvelle Vague trawls through the streets of Paris, with DOP Henri Decaë’s black and white visuals, and an atmosphere filled with Miles Davis’ soundtrack. And Moreau is at the centre of it all.

Jean Moreau’s performance is a lesson in how an actor can transmit feeling to the viewer so that the process of watching the film becomes an enobling act. Moreau’s own, fine qualities, working with the film’s aesthetic, produce a rich, cinematic experience. A look at a succession of scenes from the film demonstrates the point.

After Moreau sees Ronet’s car, her sense of confusion is manifest. She retires to a cafe. She is introspective, lost within herself – at one point, a man comes over to talk to her – and as he babbles on – his voice recedes into the film’s background and instead, we hear Moreau’s thoughts in voice-over. The point is her isolation from her surroundings, from the cafe, from the other patrons, accentuates her own elegance and exceptionalism. Here we start to absorb the strength of her mind, her psychological focus, her dignity in wrestling with a seemingly unanswerable emotional question. The chaos of the heart has not brought her low – the opposite in fact – it has caused her finer qualities to extend themselves.

In the now famous scene, where Moreau is walking through a rainy-neon Paris accompanied by the Miles Davis soundtrack, she appears lost, withdrawn, we see her muttering to herself, as she again tries to cope with the apparent desertion of her lover. And yet, Moreau maintains her poise, her precision, there is a nobility to her suffering. The turmoil gives heightened definition to Moreau’s elegance. And we experience it for ourselves – Moreau’s elegance becomes our elegance.

In another scene, Moreau bumps into a friend and enters a bar with him. She goes to a mirror and observes herself. It’s as if she is so changed internally that she needs to check whether she still recognises herself physically. When a girl at the bar says she has seen Ronet, Moreau’s spirits are momentarily lifted only to be crushed when the girl then says it was last week. But there are no histrionics from Moreau in this moment. There is a curious, pronounced raising of an eyebrow before she moves along to another part of the bar, as if taking a moment to re-adjust to this new disappointment.  Again, the trouble she is in only serves to draw attention to Moreau’s strength of character. Her isolation here serves to frame her intensity, an intensity given it’s expression through her dark eyes.

Jeanne Moreau isn’t ‘doing a character’, she’s not giving a portrayal, she isn’t narrating or explaining, nor is she trying to squeeze out ’emotions’. These are crass and stupid. What we receive from Moreau is much finer: her connection to her own experience. As Tolstoy wrote, the true artist transmits their unique feeling to the viewer. Moreau is a true artist. When we watch Lift To The Scaffold we are experiencing Moreau’s state of being. We experience her intelligence, her poise, her elegance, her precision, her concentration, her seriousness, her intensity. It’s the truth of Moreau’s own personality, and it is a fine one. And so we are raised up – our viewing becomes meaningful as we experience Jeanne Moreau’s noble qualities for ourselves.

RELATED READING
Is Acting An Art?
Being An Actor By 5 Greats