Love's delusions, and then some

Let the Sunshine In, by acclaimed French director Claire Denis, and opening Friday (an original opening date of May 18th has been changed to May 25th) at the Main Art in Royal Oak, is about the intricacies of love. Now before you think I’m getting all highfalutin let me say that by intricacies I mean the truths, lies, contradictions and mixed messages people in romantic relationships, often of the superficial and temporary kind, give one another. So, we have Isabelle, a ravishing Juliette Binoche (who at 54 has not looked more stunning), an artist, who, as the cliché would have it, can’t find love. All well and good. But let’s admit it. When you’re looking for love there can be a lot of false hopes, delusions, wrong turns, small victories and utter losses. Such is the case with our heroine. The film opens with Isabelle and a lover, Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), an almost Harvey Weinstein lookalike, with a personality to match, in bed. He’s married and tells her “you’re charming but my wife is extraordinary.” There’s the actor (Nicolas Duvauchell) who at one moment comes on to her and the next retreats. “Long live (his) family,” he says as he walks away, then turns around and asks for a date. Isabelle’s ex-husband, François (Laurent Grévill) keeps coming back for supposedly nostalgic passion then turns bitter when she says she wants the rendezvous to end. In a bar she meets a Mick Jagger-looking fellow, Sylvain (Paul Blain), who’s denigrated by a friend Fabrice (Bruno Podalydès), an art gallery owner and class-conscious snob. One would think Isabelle would reject such high-handedness, but she’s too influenced by him. And when she repeats some of Fabrice’s comments to Sylvain, he rightly tells her she could have told Fabrice to “stop badmouthing the man I love.” The point is, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a confused personality, one without the greatest sense of self, to accept people’s opinions willy-nilly. It’s this type of personality trait, and some of the confused behaviors in the interactions of the various men Isabelle meets, which makes the film all too authentic, and something we rarely see on screen. Lots of films give us one two and if we’re lucky three dimensions. Let the Sunshine In gives us multiple.