By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
On Video: LET THE SUNSHINE IN, Voilà l’enchaînement and GLORIA BELL
LET 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.
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.]