French powerhouses Juliette Binoche and Claire Denis are teaming up. Binoche will star in Denis’ next project, “Dark Glasses,” The Film Stage reports. Set to shoot in Paris and Guéret this month, the film is an adaptation “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments,” a 1978 book by influential French literary theorist Roland Barthe.
Binoche will be joined by costars Gérard Depardieu (“Life of Pi”) and Xavier Beauvois (“The Price of Fame”) in the French-language film, which is expected to premiere this fall.
Described as “revolutionary” in its Amazon synopsis, “A Lover’s Discourse” uses the “tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe’s Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, [Barthe] draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.”
While the unconventional source material seems tricky to adapt — and that’s putting it mildly — Denis is no doubt up to the challenge. “For me, cinema is not made to give a psychological explanation: for me cinema is montage, is editing,” Denis has said. “To make blocks of impressions or emotion meet with another block of impression or emotion and put in between pieces of explanation, to me it’s boring. Again, I am not trying to make it difficult [for audiences] but I think, as a spectator, when I see a movie one block leads me to another block of inner emotion, I think that’s cinema. That’s an encounter.” She explained, “I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature — my brain is. But I think we also have a dream world, the brain is also full of image and songs and I think that making films for me is to get rid of explanation.”
Denis, whose previous films include “Beau Travail,” “35 Shots of Rum,” and “Bastards,” is also working on “High Life,” a futuristic space adventure co-written by Zadie Smith. Binoche has a role in the hotly anticipated live-action version of “Ghost in the Shell” starring Scarlett Johansson.
