Lumière d'été

France

1943

112 Min

Black and White

1.37:1

French

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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SCR Pierre Laroche, Jacques Prévert

CAST Madeleine Renaud, Pierre Brasseur, Madeleine Robinson, Paul Bernard, Georges Marchal, Léonce Corne, Charles Blavette, Jane Marken, Henri Pons, Gérard Lecomte, Marcel Lévesque, Raymond Aimos, Josette Paddé

PROD DES André Barsacq, Max Douy, Alexandre Trauner, Léon Barsacq

SOUND Paul Duvergé, Jean Monchablon

Berlinale (Retrospective)

Synopsis

A shimmering glass hotel at the top of a remote Provençal mountain provides the setting for a tragicomic tapestry about lives on the edge. This Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche–scripted tale of an obsessive love pentangle—whose principals range from artist to hotel manager to dam worker—was banned from theaters for the duration of the occupation for its dark portrayal of the hedonistic excesses of the ruling class. Today, it is often singled out as Grémillon’s greatest achievement. –The Criterion Collection

Director

Jean Grémillon

Jean Grémillon (3 October 1901, Bayeux, Calvados – 25 November 1959) was a French film director. After directing a number of documentaries during the 1920s, many now lost, he had his first substantial success with the dramatic feature Maldone in 1928. Over the next quarter-century, he directed twenty more feature films, of which he is best known for five made between 1937 and 1944: L’Étrange M. Victor, Gueule d’amour (1937), Remorques (1941), Lumière d’été (1943), and Le Ciel est à vous (1944).

Grémillon rejected what he referred to as “mechanical naturalism” in favor of “the discovery of that subtlety which the human eye does not perceive directly but which must be shown by establishing the harmonies, the unknown relations, between objects and beings; it is a vivifying, inexhaustible source of images that strike our imaginations and enchant our hearts.” —Wikipedia