Mélo

The title is a chic abbreviation for 'melodrama', of which there's no shortage in this urbane period piece about a lovelorn musician enjoying an affair with the wife of his best friend. Director Alain Resnais makes no attempt to open up Henry Bernstein's 1929 stage play or hide its theatrical trappings, going so far as to fade in and out of a shot of closed curtains between each 'act'. The story offers plenty of food for thought, but the nuances of each relationship are undermined by the often dry and detached script readings, punctuated by moments of deliberate histrionic overkill, most of them provided by (an all-too animated) Sabine Azema, playing the wife of one man and mistress to another. Nevertheless it's a welcome return to Earth for an erstwhile pioneer of some of the most opaque French New Wave cinema, showing a subtlety rare even for such highbrow entertainment.