LET THE SUNSHINE IN
I doubt if any film polarised people more at its 2017 NZIFF screening than Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In. Almost everyone I spoke to had issues with it -- some even hated it!
While most agreed that it was beautifully made (although a few thought that it lacked the visual class of previous Denis collaborations with her regular cinematographer, Agnès Godard), no one denied the career-defining performance of Juliette Binoche as Isabelle (she "is a beauty").
Few, however, saw it as a comment on contemporary bourgeois indifference, in which Isabelle’s compulsive habit of deferring to controlling bastards could be equated with the world’s ongoing habit of deferring to political, corporate and neoliberal controlling bastards. Denis may not have intended such a reading, but the subtext (intended or not) gave the film additional heft for me. As Andrei Tarkovsky taught us decades ago, cinema is a mirror through which we can reflect on the world, an opportunity to find our own meanings and maybe learn something about ourselves. However, it seems to me that Denis intended her film to be understood on a broader level than merely as a portrait of a woman going through a (self-imposed?) existential crisis.
One person I spoke to grappled with why Denis chose "an impossibly beautiful woman to deliver such a cold revelation on such a lukewarm plate”, but as I see it, Juliette Binoche’s middle-aged beauty is central to Denis’s portrait of a woman who has long been a focus for male sexual attention but now struggles to find authenticity in a self-obsessed world. The film has much to say about Western societal values: the curse of beauty; the curse of privilege; the curse of having it all but having nothing; the perpetual desperation of ‘wanting and needing’.
For me, the film is primarily about delusion and deception, self-imposed as well as external. The themes are handled with a wonderfully light and very perceptive touch, evident in the writing first and foremost, but also in the performances (across the board, but particularly Binoche) and the subtle (near-invisible) quality of the filmmaking. The only time Denis draws specific attention to her directorial choices is when she elects (somewhat audaciously, but also in an inexplicably exhilarating way) to run the end credits across the last half of the final scene, which features a perfectly cast, brilliantly effortless performance from Gerard Depardieu. It suggests that Denis's fond and empathetic exasperation over her central character’s inability to take charge of her life leaves her no option but to leave Isabelle to her ongoing cycle of confusion and despair.