“Like a Judd Apatow thriller or a Michael Haneke kids flick, the concept of a Claire Denis comedy at first sounds like a contradiction in terms,” begins Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “After all, the 71-year-old French auteur, whose film Beau Travail remains one of the great works of the last few decades, has taken an especially grim turn as of late, with movies like Bastards, White Material, and The Intruder exploring some of the darker sides of contemporary humanity. So it comes as quite a surprise that Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur), which stars a moody and moving Juliette Binoche as a 50-something artist and single mother who has an extremely hard time getting—let alone knowing—what she wants, can be funny, rather light on its feet, yet incredibly perceptive about the very complicated lives and relationships we lead, especially when they involve members of the opposite sex.”
Jonathan Romney for Screen: “Originally conceived as an adaptation of critic-theorist Roland Barthes’s best-selling work A Lover’s Discourse, the film retains traces of Barthes’s ideas, notably—says Denis—the concept of ‘agony.’ But it’s something other than agony that disturbs the sleep of heroine Isabelle (Binoche), a recently divorced painter. Sharing care of her (barely-glimpsed) young daughter with ex-husband François (Laurent Grevill), Isabelle explores her newly liberated sexuality with a series of men. . . . The film is less imagistic than Denis’s other work, much more verbal—although, amid the dense thickets of dialogue about desire and emotional compatibility, what’s often important is less what is said then the rhythm of the language.”
“By the time Isabelle finds herself on a field trip, amusingly exploding at her companions in a huff of insecure frustration, Hong Sang-soo seems as valid a reference point as Nancy Meyers,” suggests David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “But Denis is too much of an iconoclast to let even the most frivolous of her films feel like they owe anything to anyone else.” Still, “this is a slight movie, shot on a whim just a few months before its world premiere, and it feels cobbled together in its search for some kind of meaning.”
“Binoche, like her compatriot Isabelle Huppert, is an actress so adept at serenely conducting inner turmoil that we risk taking their range of notes and tones for granted,” writes Guy Lodge in Variety. “Even by her standards, however, this is complex, quietly symphonic work, that extraordinary face as mesmerizing when in full, streaky-cheeked crying mode as when pensively staring at nothing in particular. . . . She’s often tongue-tied in love and hate alike, comic embarrassment and tragic insecurity written into every pause and stumble.”
“Let the Sunshine In again finds Denis working with her regular collaborators on picture and sound, director of photography Agnés Godard and composer Stuart A. Staples of the band Tindersticks,” notes Bradley Warren at the Playlist. “Regrettably, the project gives neither talent a great deal to chew on; the majority of the film is a string of conversations composed in a series of close-ups and two-shots.”
For those who speak French, the Notebook’s has put up the post-screening Q&A (19’33”).
And for news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.
from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2qWgy20
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento