Binoche lights up romantic drama ‘Sunshine’
From Paris-born, Africa-raised writer-director Claire Denis comes “Let the Sunshine In,” a modern, sexually frank collaboration between the auteur of “Chocolat” (1988) and “Beau Travail” (1999) and the great Juliette Binoche (“Three Colors: Blue,” “Clouds of Sils Maria”), and inspired loosely by prose meditations of the French author and intellectual Roland Barthes.
Binoche is Isabelle, the film’s lovelorn painter protagonist in present-day Paris, who in opening scenes is naked and in bed with her
lover, boorish, middle-aged, married banker Vincent (Xavier Beauvois). Vincent treats Isabelle like a whore, pawing her in public, and tells her that, while she is great, his wife is extraordinary and he will never leave her.
Isabelle finds it hard to resist this not very nice man, and you almost hate her for it. At the same time, Isabelle is involved with a handsome actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle), whose marriage is “toxic,” but also cannot bring himself to leave his wife.
Isabelle, who wears high heels to the neighborhood fish shop, is also engaged in a bit of an affair with her ex-husband, with whom she shares the care of their 10-year-old daughter. “Let the Sunshine In” is nothing if not a sophisticated, swirling mass of romantic entanglements, none of them satisfying for long.
But it is Binoche’s performance as a woman in search of true “real love” and who is not finding it that holds you riveted to this soap-opera-like story. Her Isabelle paints a Franz Kline-like swirl on a canvas pinned to the floor and talks about the bizarre thoughts that help her have an orgasm.
She is at times so raw, so able to leap from laughter to tears and back again, that you cannot take your eyes off her. In one sequence, Isabelle travels alone to the country and takes a walking tour in the woods near La Souterraine and completely loses it and begins shouting at her companions because of their pretentiousness, although we know it is her anguish that fuels her fury. In the country, Isabelle also meets the aptly named Sylvain (Paul Blain), although their affair is short lived.
“Let the Sunshine In” will remind you of the comic relationship films made by the likes of Woody Allen or Noah Baumbach, although Denis’ laughs are less shtick and more organic. In a late sequence, interrupted in a startling way by the final credits, Isabelle visits a “voyant” (psychic), who has his own romantic issues, played by a craggy-faced Gerard Depardieu. The psychic tells Isabelle that she longs for a love that is “weightier” and that she must remain “open” — sage advice.