At the most fundamental level, Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In is just a romantic comedy. It operates with many of the tropes of the genre, focuses on a single dynamic female lead and follows a rhythm that would be familiar to anyone versed in such films. But this is Denis calling the shots, so Let the Sunshine In is certainly not a straightforward genre exercise. Denis clangs and clatters through genre expectations, embracing, subverting and ignoring them at every turn.
The film centers on Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, who knows a thing or two about starring in romantic comedies), a Parisian divorcee and visual artist longing for emotional bonds with the men with whom she engages in sexual trysts. Perhaps Isabelle is poor at selecting a man or perhaps the men of Paris are all arrogant creeps or drug-addled depressives, but whatever the explanation, Isabelle cannot find a man in spite of all her obvious charm and her substantial efforts to do so. She is even harangued by her ex-husband (Laurent Grevill), one of her many recurring attempted partners, because her 10-year-old daughter reports that Isabelle cries in bed every night.
This is classic romantic comedy plot mechanics. The viewer waits patiently for a good man—one with an interesting job and a private fortune and perfect teeth—to finally notice that Isabelle is one of the more beautiful women in all of Paris and then come and sweep her away. But the thing is, Matthew McConaughey is not cast in this film and neither is George Clooney. The ideal male is not going to magically burst into the background and save Isabelle from her melancholic pursuit. Nope, not even one of the world’s most attractive women in the world’s most romantic city is guaranteed a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that appears after the drudgery of the downpour of her daily life. Sometimes, even the most deserving of people only get rained upon.
Denis is far from the first director to try to subvert the romantic comedy. She does it, though, in a new way. She does not veer into metafictional devices—think of the jump cuts to movie trailers about the protagonist’s life in The Holiday, for instance—or have the woman be the pursuer in the relationship that triggers the happy ending, like her fellow female-director-who-messes-with-films-she-directs, Jane Campion has done in the past.
Let the Sunshine In, in fact, does not really have an ending at all. The credits roll through the final scene while Isabelle and Denis the Clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu playing a soothsayer named after the film’s director) are still fully immersed in their conversation. For several minutes, while Denis promises Isabelle that she will finally find love and it will be wonderful and she responds with tear-streaked smiles, the names of cast and crew appear on the screen, letters running right over the faces of two of France’s biggest movie stars. It is a deeply funny closing for the film: tell anyone that a movie about one woman’s intrepid pursuit of love ends with Binoche smiling at Depardieu and they will imagine a very different climax than the one that Let the Sunshine In actually has. This is Denis winking at us, at her actors and at cinema conventions, compromising between Soderbergh’s manipulation of movie stardom in the Ocean’s trilogy and one of Godard’s treasured tactics of finally allowing movie stars to appear in his films and then humiliating them (think of Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne in Weekend).
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