Let the Sunshine In

Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In (2017) found one of France's most rigorous and elliptical directors in an unexpectedly comic register, opening the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Loosely inspired by Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse and co-written with the novelist Christine Angot, it is a wry anatomy of romantic disappointment.

Juliette Binoche gives a fearless, luminous performance as Isabelle, the artist cycling through lovers who each prove evasive or unworthy, in a film built almost entirely from conversations — seductions, quarrels, confessions — shot in Denis's characteristically intimate, tactile close-ups. The tone hovers between melancholy and farce, never settling, as Isabelle's hunger for love repeatedly meets male vanity and indecision. A closing scene with Gérard Depardieu as a voluble clairvoyant became an instant talking point.

Critics were charmed and a little surprised by Denis's lightness of touch, and Binoche's performance drew wide praise as among her best. Sharp, rueful and acutely observed, Let the Sunshine In turns the rituals of middle-aged dating into something both funny and quietly aching. It stands as proof of Denis's range — a director famous for sensual abstraction proving equally adept at the comedy of the human heart. Binoche's fearless comic-melancholic turn was widely praised as among her finest, and the film revealed an unexpected lightness in a director long associated with sensual abstraction and oblique drama.