La Visite - Le Musée du Louvre

The Louvre is not only the world’s most visited museum, it is also one of the most frequently filmed. We can all recall Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey running through its corridors in ‘Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders) by Jean-Luc Godard, or Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s tour, guided by Paul Cézanne himself. Denis Darzacq in turn opens the doors of its empty rooms to four mentally impaired British actors. Within these walls, inhabited by masterpieces of painting and sculpture, the two men and two women improvise a gestural dialogue, the freedom and the inventiveness of which are quite exhilarating. The film director does not outstay his welcome, sometimes approaching, sometimes distancing himself from these silent conversations. He awakens the intelligence of a form of cinema that echoes with the movement of these bodies, with their journeys to and fro, between intimate imagination and art. Sometimes a simple shot-counter shot suffices to illuminate a face under the painting’s gaze.

Hervé Gauville
Writer and critic