Lumière (film)
Lumière () 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 (Jeanne Moreau) is an actress who is nearing 40. She invites Laura (Lucia Bosè), her best friend of the past sixteen years, along with two other women, to a vacation retreat in Provence. Each woman is at a critical point in her life; Sarah has broken up with her longtime partner, 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. Reception. "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.