Written and directed by filmmaker Claire Denis, “Let the
Sunshine In” is a wistful romantic comedy with a bittersweet bite. The
magnificent Juliette Binoche stars as Isabelle, a divorced, relatively
successful painter looking for love in in the city of Paris. Denis and
co-writer Christine Angot observe her search for
companionship and sexual fulfilment with a dry sense of humor and an edge of
melancholy, which feels very French.
On her journey, Isabella finds herself dealing with endless
parade of oafish, self-absorbed men, like the married banker (Xavier Beauvois) who tells Isabelle she’s charming, “but my wife
is extraordinary,” or the moody, egotistical theater actor (also married, of
course). As Isabelle makes her way from one lover to the next, she finds them
all to be entitled, depressed, needy, distant, or any or all of the above. Most
end up disappointing her in one way or another. Despite these setbacks, she’s
holding onto hope that she’ll find love at last — not for nothing does the
singer Etta James become a recurring motif throughout the film.
Binoche is radiant, and Denis’s camera captures her every
movement and subtle expression with a playful sense of curiosity. Binoche leans
into Isabelle’s contradictions; she’s fiercely independent, but frequently
eager for outside approval (and hates herself for it). Like most of us, she has
a tendency to fall into the same mistakes over and over again. It’s a
wonderful, deceptively subtle performance. But watching the actress navigate
her way through a city’s worth of aging fuckboys is interesting only to a
point; after that it starts to feel like swiping left through a subtitled
version of Tinder for 90 minutes. Though in that way, the film is entirely
accurate in capturing the search for love in the modern age.
This article appears in May 23-29, 2018.
