Let the Sunshine In

 I am completely baffled by Claire Denis' 2017 Let the Sunshine in.  The film is eccentric in many respects and I'm unclear as how its peculiarities cohere.

Isabel is a woman, perhaps, 50 years old with a complicated love life.  She yearns for love but ends up scandalizing and repelling everyone with whom she has sex.  She's beautiful (the part is played by Juliet Binoche) and desirable and has no difficulty finding romantic partners, but her taste in men seems, more than a little, problematic.

We first behold her naked facing up at the camera.  Then, one of her boyfriends, a burly banker, literally bangs her for the first five minutes of the movie.  The banker is a control freak and wants her to orgasm on command and he's also a bully (we see him pushing around a hapless bartender).  The banker is married and can't restrain himself from comparing Isabel to his wife whom he refuses to leave.  "You are interesting," he says (or words to that effect), "but my wife is remarkable."  Isabel doesn't need this kind of abuse in her life and, so, she orders the guy to get out.  But, for the rest of the movie, the loathsome banker hangs around, trying to seduce her.  Next, she flirts with an insanely egotistical actor.  He whines to her about problems he is having with his wife.  They end up in bed, apparently -- we're spared the scenes of intercourse -- and, then, she quarrels with the arrogant fellow and dismisses him from her life.  Whatever she's got, it's compelling because like that Banker, the actor also hangs around.  She flirts with a cab driver, but he's appalled by her and this goes nowhere.  Then, she goes on a retreat to some rural enclave called Souterraine.  This is an artist's conference -- our heroine is an abstract expressionist artist a bit like Joan Mitchell (at one point, we see a photo of Joan Mitchell).  She paints like Pollack -- stapling down her canvas on the floor and making big calligraphic marks on it with her brush.  In the country, a bunch of artists go for a little stroll, each of them trying to outdo the other in their rhapsodies about nature.  (In fact, the landscape in which they walk is completely ordinary -- a pasture with some wooded hills and a small stream.)  The pretentious art-talk drives Isabel batty and she begins howling like dog and screaming insults at the solemn French painters.  That night, in a disco, she meets a guy who has his mouth pinched to a little cupid's bow with very hollow cheeks -- he looks like a heroin addict or junkie of some kind.  Isabel's ability to pick boyfriends is unerring as is her (bad) taste in men.  She takes up with the junkie and, more or less rapes him, but he seems to be conflicted about her and, so, they part company as well. She has one suitor who wears a floppy hat like Bob Denver on Gilligan's Island, an unfortunate and surely accidental allusion.  This goes nowhere.  Isabel has also been hooking up with her ex-husband.  Someone has told her that ex-husband has been dating Isabel's patron who owns the gallery where she exhibits.  This turns out to be an untruth.  The buxom, matronly gallery owner has an African boyfriend who sleek and suave.  Isabel poaches that guy and they go for a long walk together on the empty Paris streets.  Isabel pleads with the African to come to her house and make love with her, but he resists -- he'd like them to date a little longer and has to take his kids on vacation for a month anyway.  He says that he'll find her later when he returns from holiday.  The film, already a bit elliptical and seemingly without a plot, now takes a very strange turn.  The picture cuts to a couple having a loud quarrel in a parked car.  The couple is a weeping young woman and the pug-faced bruiser, Gerard Departdieu.  Depardieu throws the girl out of his car.  We see the Eifel Tower and, then, the film cuts to Isabel being interviewed by Depardieu.   At first, the talk is therapeutic and we think that Depardieu is a psychiatrist of some kind -- he has the same gently probing manner as a good therapist.   But, it turns out that he is soothsayer.  He's telling Isabel's fortune from various photographs of her lovers over which he dangles a kind of pendulum which spins in one direction or another.  It's a cold read and Depardieu speaks in riddles and very broad generalities.  "Painting is important to you" -- a phrase that could apply to just about every middle class Parisian.  But, of course, Isabel, who is now revealed to be not only sexually promiscuous and crazy, but also extremely stupid, takes Depardieu's oracular utterances for the gospel.  The titles run as he assures her that she will meet someone the equivalent of "tall, dark and handsome", a stranger that will finally fulfill her.  Amazon Prime doesn't let you watch closing credits and so I don't know how the colloquy with Depardieu ended -- the movie just tripped off and switched to another picture (Orson Welles Confidential Report as it happened).  

Isabel is physically desirable, but she is a mess.  Her moods shift in a matter of seconds from loving adoration to raving rage.  You certainly can't identify with her -- she is an enigma from beginning to end.  I don't have any idea what the movie is supposed to be communicating.  For what it is, Let the Sunshine In  (I think the French titles translates to something like "A Nice Sunny Room") is interesting and we get a fascinating look at Paris and its restaurants, streets and cafes.  But the whole thing is completely opaque.  

Wikipedia tells me Claire Denis' movie is based on parts of Roland Barthes' book, A Lover's Discourse:  Fragments.  This is not helpful to know and it's hard for me to imagine how a text by Barthes, the semiotician, could possibly inform an episodic movie like this one.  I have no idea how to interpret the series of truisms delivered by Gerard Depardieu and I don't even have a hypothesis for why he is introduced via the fight in the car with some woman who is not part of the movie.  I suppose if I thought about this long and hard, I could come up with some justifications for Depardieu's role in the movie (which is literally marginal), but the film is too slight to waste time thinking about.   Claire Denis is a very accomplished director, and has made some masterpieces, but this isn't one of them.