“Claire Denis’s new film, Let the Sun Shine In, about a middle-aged woman’s romantic adventures, refracts personal experience in the form of a modernistic screwball comedy,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Juliette Binoche brings luminous intensity and wicked humor to the role of Isabelle, who is first seen naked in bed, under a man who’s pumping away in vain. From the start, Denis—who co-wrote the script with the novelist Christine Angot—dramatizes with audacious wit the physically awkward and emotionally colossal details of sex and romance.”
“The film is inspired by Roland Barthes’s 1977 exegesis The Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a clinical examination of love that’s comprised of quotes and musings from a medley of canonical and esoteric writers,” notes Greg Cwik at Slant. “Turning an unadaptable work of postmodern literature into an incandescent cinematic reverie on love’s follies as a quick side project could have been a masturbatory exercise in intellectualism, but Denis finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in that most corrosive and fugacious of feelings. For Isabelle, love is a toxic need. Barthes, not known for sentimentality, discusses love as an intellectual pursuit, an aching inevitability, one to ponder rather than feel. Denis is also not known for producing art of a cuddly nature—her career is rife with barbarities, with the dissolution of lives and loves—yet Let the Sunshine In is easily the most empathetic, heartfelt film of her illustrious career.”
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Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey notes that “the characters never really stop talking; they’re constantly second-guessing, trapping, and bluffing, and though Isabelle is alternately talking to former lovers, current lovers, would-be lovers, and won’t-be lovers, Denis is fascinated by both the differences in these interactions and the subtle similarities, the hostilities and half-truths that seem universal.”
“And just as feelings or insights can shift depending on context,” writes Chloe Lizotte at Screen Slate, “Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard develop a new cinematic grammar for the film’s lengthy dialogues—the camera swoops evenly back and forth between speaker and listener, expresser and interpreter, and occasionally even crosses the axis to shake up perspective. It simulates the experience of turning a conversation over in your mind, driving yourself crazy rethinking all of its facets.”
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Earlier: Reviews from Cannes. And for those who read French, Anne Diatkine talks with Denis, Angot, and Binoche for Libération.
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Meantime, there’s a Claire Denis season on this month at the Glasgow Film Theatre.
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