So much of film history is based on availability. The three films directed by Jeanne Moreau, who died last week, at the age of eighty-nine, aren’t readily available, but I’ve seen the first of them, “Lumière,” the quasi-autobiographical drama of an actress and her circle of friends, from 1976. It’s an excellent film, one that deserves to be revived and discussed alongside the classics by other directors in which she performed. Moreau, one of the great actors of the time, was one of the best, most popular, and busiest actors of the time, and in “Lumière,” she films what she knows: the world of movies, on and off the set. The movie’s subject is the link of life and art, and it’s filled with a lifetime of thought and insight about both; Moreau conveys her harsh and blunt practical wisdom in a tone of hard-won serenity, and dramatizes the effort of maintaining it.
A mark of originality—and of modernity—in cinema is a director’s approach to performance, and from the start, Moreau, as a director and a screenwriter, reveals a distinctive way with her own performance as well as the others onscreen. Surprisingly, refreshingly, and revealingly, for a movie made by an actor in which that actor stars, it’s no bravura showcase, no feast of technique or display of virtuosity; it’s a calm, lyrical melodrama with an air of lightness and grace, a survivor’s story. It’s the story of a celebrated actress in mid-career, Sarah Dedieu (Moreau), who’s surrounded by three female friends at a lavish country estate: Julienne (Francine Racette), a busy, and esteemed, but less successful actress; Caroline (Caroline Cartier), a struggling actress; and Laura (Lucia Bosè), a wealthy Italian actress. They swim in Laura’s stone-lined pool, relax in her well-appointed house, recall long-ago adventures while dining in the garden, served by a maid—and the story flashes back to events in Paris a year earlier, when “everything changed in less than a week.”
The title, “Lumière,” means “light” (not as in weight but as in “lights, camera, action”), and it’s also the family name of the brothers Louis and Auguste, who invented the movie camera and projector and showed the first films publicly, in 1895. It’s Moreau’s first film as a director, and it’s also about the light that she casts upon her own life, her own work, her own art. Her subject is freedom—a woman’s freedom—and the gently expressed but relentlessly vigilant toughness with which it’s won and sustained. Sarah is working on a film with a dashing young director named Thomas (Francis Huster), who is also her lover; she also maintains a close, intimately familial (but seemingly platonic) relationship with an older man, Grégoire Liberman (François Simon), a soberly reflective doctor and cancer researcher.
Caroline endures insults and reproaches from Nano (Niels Arestrup), the hulking and smirking young man with whom she lives. Laura, who’s forty, is pregnant again, but her husband is openly carrying on an affair with another woman. Julienne, who’s about to work with an art-house director (Jacques Spiesser) with whom Sarah had previously had an affair, is pursued by an American actor, David Forster (Keith Carradine), who’s visiting Paris. Meanwhile, in the fateful week in question, Sarah is beginning a romantic adventure with a German writer, Heinrich Grün (Bruno Ganz), whose work she admires. That same week, she’s getting a big award and gathers her friends around her for the banquet, which becomes the focal point of her fussing and planning. She’s also about to begin work on another film.
The week turns out to be a melodramatic one, filled with dreadful losses and passionate changes (even if you can’t see the film readily, I won’t spoil its twists), but Sarah gets through them stoically. She’s not unaffected by them but she’s unperturbed by them; her focus on her work and her chosen relationships remains laser-exact and laser-intense, and it’s reflected in the contemplative precision of Moreau’s direction and in the incisive and copious dialogue, in which Sarah and her friends always hit the sensitive points lightly enough to muffle the sting. Moreau’s essential subject is love and art, private life and professional achievement, and her own taut but calm performance, seemingly undramatic and offhanded yet a lightning rod for thought and emotion, catches something here that was rare, if not invisible, in movies by other directors: the essential cinematic power of mere being, the emergence of character in presence, of energy in repose.
There’s a telling scene in which Julienne is being interviewed by a rather insistent journalist (Chloé Caillat) who asks her to define talent. At first stumped, Julienne blurts out, “to attract attention with the face you have and the body you have.” Only afterward does she discuss the power to transfix an audience with a performance; her first thought is of her presence, not her craft, and Moreau replicates that idea in two scenes of herself—or, rather, of Sarah—on movie sets. There, Moreau dramatizes her understanding of the essentially undramatic nature of her art: under the camera’s gaze, Sarah looks to the right, to the left, at the director, into the lens, seemingly doing nothing special but radiating depths of emotion with a swelling symphonic radiance. (The film’s images in which she lovingly depicts the tools of the trade, the camera and the tape recorder, suggest that the actor’s relationship to the equipment is a connection even more primal than the one with a director.)
Moreau gives Sarah a scene of erotic tension and fury—one that features bloodshed—but that’s nonetheless brisk and offhanded, its effect dissipating quickly in the force of Sarah’s purposeful, unshakeable character. Julienne, who looks up to Sarah, confides to her of wanting “everything”; Sarah quietly counsels her to pursue her adventures and her passions fully but warns her that she won’t have “everything,” and admits what she herself never achieved. “Lumière” is a film of struggle and of loss, but Sarah manages to stay above them—she’s deeply affected by them, but they never get in the way of her work.
The movie’s action, and Sarah’s persona, ride upon a cushion of money. Here, too, Moreau films what she knows, professionally and personally. Scenes in fancy cafés and restaurants that are movie-industry hangouts seethe with power, ambition, and lust. Moreau is unambivalent and unambiguous about the connection of freedom, of a woman’s freedom, to her financial independence (as is seen in the contrast of Sarah’s private life with Caroline’s domestic miseries). Sarah’s art is also her job, and the lavish surroundings of her country estate, where the action begins, and from the serene sanctity of which Sarah and her friends look back at a week of turmoil endured and overcome, are more than the contours of her private pleasures, more even than the rewards that her talent has provided—they’re the very conditions and terms of her art.
Working with the cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich, she develops a gliding, peering, shifting aesthetic to match the glossy surfaces with which she conveys shuddering depths of feeling. The camera roves around the actors, capturing the agitation within their controlled gestures, suggesting the elegance of leisure and luxury within which high adventures of passion, pleasure, and power—of self-creation and self-definition—play out.
“Lumière” doesn’t talk dollars and cents (and that reticence may be the film’s one glaring omission), but it puts its money conspicuously onto the screen; in this regard, it foreshadows—in more than one way—another film by a more celebrated director who also has made the connection between money and art a crucial theme. A tracking shot from outside Sarah’s country house, roving from window to window and peering in at the women who are inside, anticipates a celebrated sequence in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague,” from 1989, a metaphorical history of cinema from the perspective of wealth and power. (Godard sought to work with Aronovich in the late nineteen-seventies, but the collaboration didn’t pan out.) I don’t know whether Godard has seen “Lumière.” I’ve never read any published remarks by him about it, and he was more or less outside the film industry when Moreau’s film was released. But, directly or indirectly, I believe that it had an influence on the work that he did when he returned, several years later.
