Let the Sunshine In: One Love

That moment distills the essence of Let the Sunshine In: It’s human to crave companionship. But how many allowances are we supposed to make for the imperfections, great and small, of the people who cross our path? The picture doesn’t have a conventional plot; Isabelle’s face, showing quick­silver gradations between self-protectiveness and openness, is the plot. We find her at a specific time in her life, an era of strange dates and unsatisfactory sex. She does, of course, have a life outside these men: she’s a mother, sharing custody of a daughter with her ex-husband, and she’s successful and respected in her field. The point, maybe, is that women are often told—or try to convince themselves—“Shouldn’t that be enough?” But the desire for a romantic life can’t always be wished away.

Denis cowrote the script with novelist Christine Angot; it’s adapted, loosely, from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, whose subtitle, fitting for a compendium of ruminations on the nature and components of love, is Fragments. The “fragments” in Barthes’s 1977 book include compassion, jealousy, and languor, though not all of them are even nouns: you’ll also find unbearable, monstrous, and pigeonholed. In an introductory section, Barthes offers some guidance as to how he has organized these fragments: “Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident. Confronting each of these incidents (what ‘befalls’ him), the amorous subject draws on the reservoir (the thesaurus?) of figures, depending on the needs, the injunctions, or the pleasures of his image-repertoire. Each figure explodes, vibrates in and of itself like a sound severed from any tune—or is repeated to satiety, like the motif of a hovering music.”

Who, you might ask, could make a movie out of that? Perhaps the woman who, in her youth, as she revealed in a 2002 interview for the French magazine Sofa, wanted to be a rock star—but not just any rock star: “I studied economics, it was completely suicidal. Everything pissed me off. And at the same time, I had this kind of crazy way of doing things. I wanted to go and live in England so I could be Eric Burdon, the singer from the Animals.” Or perhaps the woman who ended her glorious 1999 film Beau travail, a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, with a spring-loaded dance sequence that bursts, practically, from nowhere: when Denis Lavant’s uptight, resentful Foreign Legion sergeant Galoup shrugs off the constraints of the mortal world, he enters a disco heaven, a place where Fred Astaire twirls, rather than regimented marching and bed making, are the order of the day. (This is a heaven with no harp music; the celestial melody that gets Galoup going is Corona’s 1993 dance hit “The Rhythm of the Night.”) Denis can make a movie out of, or about, just about anything: cockfighting (No Fear, No Die, 1990), lovesick cannibals (Trouble Every Day, 2001), an impenetrable, unlikable, ailing man who sets out to get himself a black-market heart and find his lost son (The Intruder, 2004, which also happens to be adapted from some rather out-there source material, an autobiographical essay by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy).

Born in Paris but raised in West Africa, Denis has been making movies for thirty years, and though she returns to certain themes—the moral complications of colonialism, the vulnerable state of being a perpetual outsider—there is no such thing as a typical Claire Denis movie. Let the Sunshine In could be considered a fraternal twin to her Friday Night (2002), in which a thirtysomething woman (Valérie Lemercier), about to move in with her boyfriend, chances into a tender, life-changing one-night stand with a stranger (Vincent Lindon) in the midst of a Paris traffic jam. A restless, questioning spirit motivates both movies. Even though it seems futile to search for what’s missing in our lives—the harder we look, the less likely we are to find it—complacency is more dangerous. Being stuck, in traffic or in a life, requires that we push our way out; if we don’t use those muscles, we may forget how to, and that’s the beginning of the end.

In Let the Sunshine In, Binoche’s Isabelle flexes those muscles when, upon her return from another disappointing assignation with her banker lover, her tears of frustration find their way out in a line of dialogue, almost an incantation she recites to herself: “I want to find love. One real love.” No one is right for Isabelle: not the banker, not the fish-market bachelor, not the actor. One man, the kind and gorgeous Marc—played by Denis regular Alex Descas—floats in her art-world circle and seems promising, but he is reluctant to be in a relationship with her. At an artists’ retreat, she meets a smoldering, spooky gent (Paul Blain) on the dance floor. It’s an Etta James song, “At Last,” that brings them together; they drift close, as if in a trance. (James may be Isabelle’s patron saint: a framed album cover bearing the singer’s image hangs in her apartment.) But that romance doesn’t last either. Isabelle sabotages it in a scene that’s half-funny, half-painful. She can’t stop overthinking, she can’t stop asking questions; she worries this particular relationship into oblivion.