Claire Denis is not done surprising the world. The French great has been raising eyebrows for several years with the plans for “High Life,” her English language debut, a reality-warping sci-fi odyssey to star Robert Pattinson that’s still expected in 2018. But first, as if she needed to zig before she can zag, Denis has quickly released “Let The Sunshine In” (an imperfect translation of the French, “Un beau soleil intérieur,” which refers to an illumination from within), a film that couldn’t be more different from her planned intergalactic opus. A romantic comedy in fragments, “Let The Sunshine In” is intimate, sophisticated, extremely French, and loosely based on “A Lover’s Discourse” by literary theorist and aesthete Roland Barthes. If this sounds too cerebral to be fun, fear not; the intellectual trappings may be excellent garnishes for some viewers, but the main course is a performance by Juliette Binoche of radiant immediacy, fully inhabiting the mixture of passion and vulnerability that defines the search for love.
The term “love story” is misleadingly totalizing, as if one instance of love could be capable of telling the whole story of something as polymorphous and personal as love. “A Lover’s Discourse” isn’t a story at all, more of an encyclopedia of love, attempting to define and elucidate highly specific feelings or experiences of love, like the agony of waiting for a lover to telephone, or the reverberations that a lover leaves behind in mind and body. Like Barthes, Denis seems interested in isolating highly specific experiences of love and allowing the audience space to turn them over in their heads and consider them from different angles (aided by the probing camerawork of Agnes Godard). Like the book, there is little linking the episodes other than the subject. But whereas all Barthes had to work with on the page was a single, insubstantial letter “I,” Denis has the benefit of interpreting each event through the eloquent eyes of Juliette Binoche, and the feelings she conveys are more than strong enough to induce the audience to construct a narrative around her romantic yearnings.
Binoche plays Isabelle, a recently divorced Parisian painter who is looking for love in a variety of men. Most of the men she meets are fully realized without judgment; Denis gives each enough space to convey their essential personalities and the shape of their lives. Yet their full selves don’t matter much in the context, only their compatibility with Isabelle. There’s the rude banker whose very repugnancy gives her an erotic frisson. There’s the shifty theater actor with a drinking problem who sabotages their relationship as soon as he can. There’s the mysterious stranger she’s magnetically drawn to on the dance floor to the strains of Etta James’ “At Last”; the song is something of a theme for the movie. And of course there’s her ex that she still has some complicated feelings for, but she can’t help chasing him out of her apartment when he lets himself in.
Even when there is compatibility, fits of passion seize Isabelle (most entertainingly while being given a tour of a country estate) or her lovers and cause them to act in self-defeating ways. Binoche gives a truly great performance, in many ways defined by how opposed it is to what are traditionally thought of as “great parts.” There’s no overarching moral or lesson, no sense of her being in any way extraordinary, rather she is just giving voice to a staggering variety of feelings, in an manner that’s equal parts vulnerable and pugnacious. In lazy romantic comedies, the structure and the story rigidly dictate the emotions the characters and audience are supposed to feel, but in “Let The Sunshine In,” the messy, uncontainable feelings that capture Isabelle dictate the story, such as it is. The film is anti-narrative in a sense, portraying more a state of being than a story and questioning the fact that an ending can ever truly come to the romantic search. One of the film’s most exciting scenes is its last, in which Isabelle gets a psychic reading from Gerard Depardieu, with new realizations coming even as the credits roll.
It’s a testament to Denis’ skill that “Let The Sunshine In” could probably be watched by one person as a breezy comedy and by another as a rigorously intellectual exercise and enjoyed by both. Denis collapses the distance between high and low culture, putting the foibles of love under a highly studied eye and making a film that deserves multiple viewings, but even with just one is simply fun. Denis and Binoche have made a film that’s both smart and sexy, imbuing new excitement and wonder into the emotional connections that define us all. [A]
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