Le Tourbillon

Jeanne Moreau and JULES ET JIM

In an earlier post, about Luis Buñuel, I mentioned meeting Jeanne Moreau and listening to her flood of movie anecdotes. (This was a lunch at the French Embassy in London on the occasion of her 70th birthday. She brought her own cases of red wine for us all, perhaps not trusting the Embassy’s taste.)

There was an Embassy official at the table, whose job, it seemed, was to lob softball questions at Moreau, so that she could hit them out of the park.

“Now you must tell how you met our famous French film director, François Truffaut,” the official suggested.

“Oh, it was at Cannes, at the Palais du Cinéma. I was there with Louis” – Louis Malle, we had to understand – “and then François came up with another person. For some time François was walking with Louis and I was behind with the other person. Then there was a change, and I was walking with François. And it was very strange, because he would look only down at the ground, he would not look me in the eye. Then finally he looked me in the eye, and he said,” – big dramatic pause – “’Can I have your telephone number?’”

“And,” the Embassy official said, redundantly, “you gave it to him.”

One of the consequences of this moment was the great film, Jules et Jim. I took over the questioning from the Embassy official.

“In Jules et Jim, I always loved the scene in which you sang that song, Le Tourbillon,” I said. “Can I ask, was that an old song, or was it written for the movie?”

“Neither,” she said. “It was written for me.”

Le Tourbillon, “The Whirlpool,” or perhaps just “The Whirl,” was written by Serge Rezvani, the Parisian son of a Persian father and a Russian-Jewish mother. Moreau allowed her lunch companions to believe that the song, which is about a couple who repeatedly come together, break up, and come together again, was in some way based on her friendship with M. Rezvani. I had no way of knowing if that was true.

“But now,” I asked, “now that it’s so famous as the song in Jules et Jim, do you still think of it as the song that was written for you, or has it become the song from the movie?”

“Oh,” she said, “absolutely, now it’s just the song from the film.”

A little shrug. I found myself feeling sorry for M. Rezvani, whom she had so lightly written out of her story. The song has a happy ending. The anecdote… not so much,

Here’s a link to the song, with English subtitles. Enjoy.