By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

On Video: LET THE SUNSHINE IN, Voilà l’enchaînement and GLORIA BELL

LTSI_Image_5LET THE SUNSHINE IN (Criterion). Writer-director Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche are articulate about the seductive, seditious, delicious comedy, Let The Sunshine In—original French title “Un beau soleil intérieur,” “or “a great sunshine inside”—but not nearly as articulate as Denis’ miraculous, hilarious, achingly romantic yet wholly effortless lyric to desire itself. It’s an enthralling miracle. [Review here.] There’s a superb extra, a short piece that hasn’t been readily available until now, Voilà l’enchaînement (2014), directed by Denis and adapted from a text by Let the Sunshine In cowriter Christine Angot, with actors Norah Krief and Alex Descas. (I saw it as part of a tribute at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 2017.) Elemental compositions, simple declarations between a man and a woman, the energy of language that both accuses and seduces. So much more than theater, electric with words, as gestural as kabuki yet dense with emotional vigor. Voilà l’enchaînement (“here’s the sequence,” or approximately, “How It Happened”) will rightfully become better known.

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GLORIA BELL (Lionsgate). For his sixth feature, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio (A Fantastic Woman) remade his fourth feature, but, he says, not out of any fealty to his own continuing devotion to his portrait of a spirited middle-aged divorcée with an office job who remains interested in dance, drink and sexual adventure, while maintaining an everyday life. Instead, he says, it was out of his enduring admiration for Julianne Moore but also her own fervid love for Lelio’s original. Moore is superb: always more life. [Review here.]

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon