Let the Sunshine In

Juliette Binoche seeks to rise out of middle-aged torpor in Let the Sunshine In

Clair Denis' Let the Sunshine In follows the travails, mostly romantic, of a fiftyish Parisian embodied by Juliette Binoche. Binoche turns on a bed to face the audience naked from the waist up to open the film. Denis is signaling that her protagonist's aging body will be the primary focus of her canvas, a fitting strategy for a portrait of a lovelorn painter. Happily, Ms. Binoche is up to the challenge and delivers one of her most direct and unfussy performances. The jitters, ticks and cute poses are dropped for a subtle and restrained portrait of a troubled woman.

Chief among her troubles are the damaged men she falls for. The initial bedroom scene is with a swinish banker named Vincent. Xavier Beauvois is convincing as a repulsive, self-hating figure whose vulgarity seems to come from a 20s melodrama. Binoche's Isabelle soon has a tryst with a younger, more attractive man who is an actor. However, he is ambivalent towards her and hints to her that he has a violent side. Denis films their circling of each other as the pull of opposites with the actor in black and Ms. Binoche in red. When they next meet after their tryst, Isabelle is flirtatious in a black and red outfit. The actor, regretting their interlude, is in a somber black jacket with a blue shirt.

Denis and her compatriots skillfully paint the Paris of today and its brooding inhabitants, but some aspects are lacking. Denis treatment of Isabelle's painting is cursory. There is one sequence of Binoche attacking a canvas lying flat like Jackson Pollock and a visual shout out to Joan Mitchell, but Isabelle's artistic motivations are largely jettisoned for l'amour. This is touched upon in the concluding segment where Isabelle visits a clairvoyant, amusingly played by Gerard Depardieu. That Denis uses such a device to tie things up belies the ultimately lightweight nature of this enterprise. Let the Sunshine In is a winning film, but not up to the standards of, say, Lelio's Gloria, as a portrait of a middle-aged divorcee.