When Jean-Paul Belmondo passed away in September, few obituaries mentioned this dreamily downbeat drama, despite the participation of director Peter Brook (The Beggar's Opera) and actress Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim). Though the Cannes Film Festival named Moreau best actress in 1960, the movie didn't drum up much business when it opened in the States four years later. Furthermore, Belmondo would dismiss it, factors that may have contributed to its low profile.
If Belmondo found Brook's direction overly-precise, he convinces as Chauvin, an itinerant factory worker entranced by Moreau's Anne, the factory owner's lonely wife. If anything, his mercurial character isn't worlds away from the charismatic thief he played in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.
One day while attending her son's piano lesson, Anne hears a woman scream. Afterward, she heads to the café on the ground floor, where she witnesses the aftermath of a crime of passion: a lifeless body on the floor and a murderer in handcuffs.
From outside the café windows, Chauvin also watches the events unfold. The next day, Anne finds herself drawn to the scene of the crime where she meets Chauvin with whom she shares theories about why the young man killed his lover. As turns out, Chauvin has been watching Anne for a while, whereas she had never noticed him before. Their interest in the murder both incites and reflects their impossible predicament.
Over the next week, they meet at the café, in a forest, and in a town across the river. While wandering through an abandoned house as her son cavorts with other boys, Anne cautions her companion, "Summer never comes here, it's always windy." Whether she realizes it or not, she's describing her life, except instead of confessing their feelings for each other, the two continue to speculate about the murder that brought them together.
Later, when Anne presides over a Buñuelesque dinner at her palatial home, complete with eerily shiny seafood, she finds herself as out of step with the upper-class guests as with the café’s rough-hewn clientele. The film ends with the suggestion that Chauvin has woken Anne up from her bourgeois slumber, but that she still has a long way to go.
In adapting Marguerite Duras's novella, Brook draws on his theatrical background to emphasize their isolation from the larger community. In the abandoned house, Anne appears in the foreground while Chauvin appears in the background, more shadow than human, while in the forest, a key light illuminates their figures as the bare, towering trees fade into blackness.
Though Brook hails from Britain, the film has the unhurried pace of an Alain Resnais or Michelangelo Antonioni mood piece. In filmmaker and archivist Daniel Kremer's detail-oriented commentary track, he makes a persuasive case for Seven Days… Seven Nights as an insightful work deserving of greater attention—even if it's precisely the kind of unhurried objet d'art that would encourage Belmondo to segue to more action-oriented fare in the ensuing years. Recommended.