The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
ance. Male dominance and clericalism feed on each other. As one begins to disappear in the central symbolic act of Christian worship, the other will inevitably be weakened too. Maybe then we will...
...For it not only stars Jeanne Moreau, but is about her as well, and was written and directed by her...
...As she and Laura lie on her bed chatting about their lives, another young star who is a friend, Julienne (Francine Racette), is also at home chatting about her life with a woman, a journalist doing an interview...
...Its dreaminess is appropriate to the rest of Lumi~re, and at the same time it makes Sara's story into something other than a dream...
...No matter where she goes, she seems to remain, like one asleep, in bed...
...Perhaps what makes the illusion of a single night's interim so strong is the fact that Sara almost never leaves that bed...
...This is why she is able to experience them, as one always does the people in a dream, without ever leaving her bed...
...At the very beginning of Lumi~re, even before that bedroom scene in Sara's film with which the plot of Moreau's film begins, there is a prologue in which Sara and the other women in her life are living communally at a country house...
...Maybe then we will be able to see our way toward a redefinition of ordination not as the setting apart of a clerical caste but as the recognition and celebration of the immense variety of gifts with which Christ has blessed the People of promise...
...There she receives calls and letters, makes and breaks dates, and rehearses her fines...
...It's as if the whole of Lumi~re has taken place overnight, while Sara slept, even though we know that in reality a year has passed between those two scenes just mentioned...
...Attending an awards ceremony at a hotel, she ends up in bed with a new lover, Heinrich (Bruno Ganz), in his room...
...Yet at the same time that LumiOre is about a world of total illusion, a dream world, it is also a documentary...
...This news does indeed come like a rude awakening from the long night's sleep which has lasted almost the entire film...
...It gets us to accept Sara, and perhaps even Jeanne Moreau, on her now, complicated, self-regarding terms...
...And when Sarah must finally he gotten up in that penultimate scene, it is to he told that the only man capable of a lasting relationship with her has shot himself...
...Later, the night that Sara has Thomas up for a meal in her bedroom in order to let him down gently, Julienne is eating a meal in a bedroom as well, a hotel room where she has been lured by an American actor (Keith Carradine) whom she is now, like Sara, trying to evade...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, .JR...
...While Sara lies in bed one night rehearsing some lines, yet another friend, Caroline (Caroline Cartier), is actually in bed too having a "scene" of her own--an argument with her boyfriend about whether she can act...
...Like that old friend of Sara's that commits suicide, Gr~goire (Francois Simon), a cancer researcher who discovers he too is now infected with cancer, Moreau's film studies the very sensibility with which she herself is afflicted...
...The subsequent story of Sara's sleep and awakening is then posed as a flashback that commences here, where Sara has been recovering from the breakdown Gr6goire's suicide caused...
...As is suggested by the oblique, veiled parallels their lives seem to have with her own, they are all manifestations of herself, embodiments of her own desires and anxieties...
...The flashback it creates makes her story into a memory as well, a documentation of what actually happened rather than a mere dream of what might happen yet...
...When her friend Laura (Lucia Boze) comes to town, Sara visits by flopping down on the same bed with her to chat...
...This is what gives it its density and singularity as a film...
...18 February 1977:114...
...By being both things at once, Lumi~re invests itself with a certain conflict and urgency...
...Although this idyll may at first seem too sweet and idealized, it is in fact just the right induction to the film that follows...
...Let us indeed move on toward a "dual-sex liturgy" both for its own sake and because, when it becomes the common practi~e, a non-caste, declericalized liturgy is sure to follow soon...
...Even before she comes home to bed that first night, she is already in bed, doing a bedroom scene at the point where we pick up her story on the set of her new film...
...In the French film-making of the last twenty years, especially that of the New Wave in which Moreau rose to stardom, there is an acute awareness of the paradox by which all filmmaking is a documentary of a fantasy, a record and realization of someone's imaginings...
...When Sara wants to break off with a lover, Thomas (Francis Huster), she has him into the bedroom too...
...Just as the people in Sara's life are all really Sara, so Sara herself is really Jeanne Moreau...
...FACE8 OF EVE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Shortly after the beginning of LumiOre, film star Sara Dedier (Jeanne Moreau) winds up a day's work on the set of her current movie and goes home to bed...
...By playing o~ documentary against fantasy in this way, Moreau makes of this journey into herself a labyrinth where she can keep a healthy distance from herself...
...Moreover, the stories of most of the other characters in Lumidre, which are cross-cut with Sara's own story, seem vaguely parallel to the life she lives in bed...
...In effect, then, coming to light between the time Sara goes to bed and the time she wakes up, all these other characters in the film are figures in a dream...
...This paradox hasn't been lost on Moreau, either, having participated in it so often...
...Then shortly before the end, Sara gets up again in the morning and returns once more to the set...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 4
