MON CŒUR EST ROUGE
(MY HEART IS RED)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1976
110 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30 PM

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE stars Françoise Lebrun as Clara, a market research analyst hired by a big cosmetics company to interview women from different walks of life about their makeup-purchasing habits. (Rosier’s original treatment for the film put it like this: “What began as research for better ways to lie to women becomes a quest for truths only women can reveal.”) The process sees her probing questions of femininity in a Paris that’s modernizing at a rapid rate; while Clara strikes up a spur-of-the-moment romance along the way, much of the film concerns people’s embrace of (and resistance to) the new freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies. MON CŒUR EST ROUGE is a bruisingly funny cross-examination of second wave feminism and its discontents – ending in an extraordinary finale at a “Women’s Fair”, with a murderer’s row of Rosier’s collaborators playing luminaries such as Freud, Sartre, Aristotle, Marx and Shakespeare in drag – provoking dreams of an alternative history away from masculine supremacy.

Michèle Rosier (1930-2017) was a pioneering fashion designer (she created the vinyl-intensive V de V sportswear label), a journalist who worked as editor of the women’s lifestyle magazine Le Noveau Femina, and an avowed leftist. She also had a 40+ year career behind the camera, directing several documentaries for French television as well as a handful of theatrical features, most famously the George Sand biopic GEORGE QUI?, starring Anne Wiazemsky. Rosier’s cumulative body of work is staggering, and the movies bely an utterly idiosyncratic filmmaking sensibility: wryly funny, curious about people, jazz-suffused (with scores by Mal Waldron, Keith Jarrett and Aldo Romano) and forever interrogating the limits of liberation in post-1968 France. While she’s a known quantity in France, Rosier has never before been given a proper retrospective in the United States; we’re honored to show these works in a two-part series spread over November and December, with her signature work MON CŒUR EST ROUGE (MY HEART IS RED) screening in a brand new digitization with fresh subtitles translated and timed by Spectacle volunteers.

This series is part of Brooklyn Falls for France, a cultural season organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and FACE Foundation in partnership with Brooklyn venues. Special thanks to Go Films, Hervé Boulliane, Bernard Payen (Cinematheque Francaise), Nathanaël Arnould (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) and Amélie Garin-Davet.