Let the Sunshine In

Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In (2017) opened the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and found one of France's most rigorous and elliptical directors in an unexpectedly comic mood. 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 plays Isabelle, an artist cycling through lovers who each prove evasive or unworthy, and gives a fearless, luminous performance in a film built almost entirely from conversation: seductions, quarrels and confessions, shot in Denis's characteristically intimate, tactile close-ups. The tone hovers between melancholy and farce without ever settling on either, as Isabelle's hunger for love runs again and again into male vanity and indecision. A 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 comic and melancholy turn was praised as among her finest. Sharp, rueful and acutely observed, Let the Sunshine In makes the rituals of middle-aged dating funny and sore in equal measure. It also proved the range of a director some had thought confined to one register. Denis had long been associated with sensual abstraction and oblique drama, and here she turned out to be just as adept at the comedy of the human heart, which is a harder thing to film than it looks.