Lumière (film)

Lumière (Light) is a French drama film written and directed by Jeanne Moreau. The semi-autobiographical film is about the friendship between four actresses. It is credited as being one of the first films to focus on female friendship.

Plot
Sarah is an actress who is nearing 40. She invites Laura, her best friend of the past sixteen years, along with two other women, Caroline and Julienne, to a vacation retreat in Provence. Each woman is at a critical point in her life; Sarah has broken up with her longtime partner, while Laura is pregnant but her husband is carrying on an affair with another woman. Caroline is in an unhappy relationship, and Julienne is being pursued by an American actor.

Release
Lumière was screened as one of the three French films at the 1976 Toronto International Film Festival. Following screening, the film was released by the New World Pictures.

On 16 March 2023, The Criterion Collection screened Lumière, The Adolescent and Lillian Gish at the Film Forum.

In 2023, Carlotta Films sold the distribution rights to Japan, who released Lumière, The Adolescent and Lillian Gish under an umbrella name Jeanne Moreau, Filmmaker.

In 2024, Jeanne Moreau, Filmmaker was released on Blu-ray.

Reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Lumière has an approval rating of 60% based on 5 reviews.

Lumière received critical acclaim. Critic Roger Ebert wrote positively of the film, commenting "as the strands of [Moreau's] story become clear and we begin to know the characters, the movie grows into a simple and strong emotional statement."

In a retrospective review, Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote, "Working with the cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich, [Moreau] 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."