Because La Musica was Marguerite Duras’ first directorial effort, Paul Seban (onetime assistant director to Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné) came on board as codirector to safeguard the production and ensure the film’s more widespread appeal. Indeed, La Musica is Duras’ most formally conventional film (excluding her final feature, the 1985 dark comedy Les enfants), more akin to a French New Wave drama than one of her later experiments with sound and image. This black-and-white talkie, an expansion of Duras’ one-act play of the same name, is about a couple, played by Seyrig and Robert Hossein, who reunite three years after their divorce. Straddling the calamitous and mundane aspects of broken love, the winding relationship story is the first of several collaborations between the Hiroshima, mon amour writer and Seyrig. The actress was immediately taken by Duras’ literary approach to cinema and once described the director’s vision for the film as being simply about the “dialogue and faces, and that’s all.”