Cast
Romaine Belcroix: Sabine Azéma
Christiane Levesque: Fanny Ardant
Pierre Belcroix: Pierre Arditi
Marcel Blanc: André Dussollier
Dr Remy: Jacques Dacqmine
Priest: Hubert Gignoux
Yvonne: Catherine Arditi

French New Wave director Alan Resnais' 1986 film takes its inspiration from a little-known 1929 theatrical melodrama by Henri Bernstein which sets the plot of the eternal love triangle against a backdrop of Paris in the 1920s.

Deceptively simple in appearance, the film is directed by Alan Resnais, who also directed the perhaps better-known Hiroshima, Mon Amour and follows the story of two musicians, Marcel Blanc and Pierre Belcroix, whose friendship dates back to their youth at the conservatoire. While Marcel has achieved international fame as a soloist, he remains haunted by past love affairs, whereas Pierre has settled down in a Parisian suburb to lead a simple life with his wife, Romaine. However, after a quiet evening spent drinking and reminiscing, Marcel and Romaine begin what is to develop into a passionate affair, which then escalates as Romaine plots to gradually poison the unsuspecting and good-natured Pierre.

The play from which Resnais took his inspiration has been described variously as 'a trite play', 'wrapped in pretentious dialogue' so it is to his credit therefore that the final film was so highly-acclaimed, particularly when he adhered to the trappings of the original theatrical setting to such a large extent: throughout, the film is peppered with theatre simulacra, taking place within the confines of stage-sized space, with sets featuring painted night skies, and with every act punctuated by a painted curtain, but within that space the camera follows and articulates the action with immaculate precision, recreating the mental space of 'melodrama', some years after it had gone helplessly out of fashion.

As a result, the proximity and the erudite dialogue, observed in close-up after lingering close-up combine to make the film an utterly hypnotic concoction of the simple and the complex. Superbly directed and filmed as though it were indeed a play, the great camera work ensures that there is something about the film's tragic romance that is spellbinding.

Masterfully directed, Mélo is both an entertaining romantic melodrama and an extension of Resnais's ideas about memory and imagination, reality and fiction.