Un beau soleil intérieur

Claire Denis (2017)

In the first few minutes of Let the Sunshine In, set in present-day Paris, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) and Vincent (Xavier Beauvois) are having sex.  Their lovemaking and conversation reveal Vincent to be overweight and insensitive, Isabelle to be obliging and emotionally vulnerable.  Why is this beautiful woman allowing herself to be screwed by an unattractive man and how come he’s so thoroughly vile?    Claire Denis soon supplies the answer to the second question.  Vincent is a banker:  enough said.  Isabelle, of course, doesn’t work in the financial sector because she’s the main character and a supposedly appealing one.  The opening sequence doesn’t entirely predict what’s to follow.  The recently divorced Isabelle, submissive in bed with Vincent, says no to at least as many men as reject her in the course of her continuing search for a new and lasting relationship.  (She quite soon, thank goodness, gets rid of Vincent, who’s already made clear he’ll never leave his wife for his mistress.)  But the strongly implied message of the first scene that Isabelle is deserving of the viewer’s sympathetic interest comes across loud and clear in the remaining ninety minutes of the film.  The heroine gets brownie points for being an artist, a mother and Juliette Binoche.

Isabelle is described by a colleague as ‘a great artist’ but she’s too preoccupied with her love life to paint for more than a few seconds of screen time.  We’re similarly told that she thinks the world of her daughter (Louise Loeb).  The girl appears to live mostly with her father François (Laurent Grévill) and our only glimpse of her comes as he and she drive away from Isabelle’s apartment.  At least Binoche’s luminous emotionality is demonstrated on screen rather than merely asserted in the script but it’s hard to care about the privileged, self-absorbed woman she’s playing – let alone about any of the males she meets and, in some cases, sleeps with, though these men too are interpreted by talented people.  They include Nicolas Duvauchelle as a vain, commitment-fugal actor, oppressed by the ‘nightly grind’ of stage performance, and Alex Descas, a quietly charismatic gallery owner.  Xavier Beauvois (the director of Of Gods and Men) discharges the thankless task of Vincent incisively.  Isabelle finally resorts to consulting a clairvoyant about her future prospects:  he’s played by Gérard Depardieu and their interview continues throughout the closing credits.  The clairvoyant tells Isabelle none of her recent suitors or love interests will provide lasting happiness.  At one point, he says the man for her will be someone more solid, sturdier etc and the audience titters at the spectacle of the man-mountain who delivers these self-interested lines.  The film’s conclusion and the casting of Depardieu seal its attitude towards the protagonist and her more oddball encounters:  their follies and foibles are meant to be irresistibly engaging.

The clairvoyant keeps talking, no matter how much crap comes out of his mouth.  This too is a motif of Let the Sunshine In, though it’s less certain that Claire Denis always intends it to be received as crap.  ‘Un beau soleil intérieur’ is a phrase used by the clairvoyant and repeated as a mantra both by him and by Isabelle in the closing stages; the film’s English title, in combination with Juliette Binoche’s look of contentment on the poster, gives the impression of a middle-aged-woman’s renaissance romcom.   Denis, needless to say, is after something much more intellectally respectable.  The dialogue in her and Christine Angot’s screenplay, ‘inspired by’ Roland Barthes’s 1977 text Fragments d’un discours amoureux, includes plenty of aperçus about the nature of love and examples of characters’ tying themselves in knots through self-consciousness about what they’re saying or trying to say.  Their acute awareness of the tropes and rituals of cinematic romance is part of why they keep stepping back from giving themselves fully to another person.

Claire Denis is seen by some as the world’s leading female film-maker but Let the Sunshine In doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.   There are only two significant exchanges between female characters.  In the first, Isabelle, with extreme awkwardness, asks her new professional partner Maxime (Josiane Balasko) if it’s true that, as Vincent told her, Maxime and François once had a thing going.  In the second, Isabelle, lunching with her friend Ariane (Sandrine Dumas), answers (at last) the question of why she was involved with Vincent.  Although this didn’t happen in their bed scene at the start, Isabelle tells Ariane she experienced orgasm by thinking what a bastard Vincent was.  Obviously disadvantaged people who might prick the conscience of the heroine et al into thinking about someone else’s problems are absent from the streets of Paris in Let the Sunshine In.  The characters don’t have access to a larger world picture through watching television or looking at a newspaper.  This truly gruesome film had an extraordinary effect on me.  After not very long, I felt I’d rather be watching the collected works of Ken Loach than another hour of Claire Denis.

15 April 2018