Let the Sunshine In

By now we expect a Clare Dennis movie to be a stylish, incisive anatomy of French cultural or political traditions (aka cliches). Here she deploys romance queen Juliette Binoche as a passionate beauty moving relentlessly through a series of unfulfilling affairs. The film targets France's current decay into an amoral, self-destructive shallowness. 

Isabelle is a successful painter, specifically an abstract expressionist. In the one work we see she splashes broad black strokes across a floored white canvas, hoping her sweeping slashes will discover and express a passion she has nowhere — or no-one — else for it to go. She seeks in that formless chaos a meaning and beauty in revolt against traditional orderliness.    
     That’s in love as in her art. In her search for someone in whom to invest her ardor she chooses poorly — the selfish, insulting married banker, the equally shallow married actor, the comically silent and vulpine labourer she meets in a dance. Her conversations are a cover under which she hides, hoping to pounce on the one physical connection that will sustain and absolve her. Except for the labourer, her dates sink into wordy chats that are meaningless, empty parodies of a connection.
     We see her painting only once. So she seems to be only playing at the role of the romantic artist — and in an almost obsolete genre at that.

At first Isabelle easily commands our sympathy, our identification. But the sequence of her brittle affairs steadily shifts her from model to warning. As she moves through the variously unappealing men, as we watch her emotional rollercoaster, we see her as a compulsive dependent, whose modern sexual freedom only restricts self-discovery and prevents lasting satisfaction. 

She proves a selfish mother, a mercurial ex-wife, and variously unsupportive or unfaithful to her lovers, all under the cover of her own needs and special sensitivity. In admission of her self-disrespect, Isabelle admits she got an orgasm with the banker only by focusing on how disgusting he is. Yet she told him she loves him. 

As her every sexual conquest only deepens her isolation, Isabelle’s whole society is a satire of modern French culture. The genial but foppish neighborhood suitor who invites her to the country only provokes her explosion at bourgeois complacency, especially as it romanticizes their Nature. But from her attack on that cliche she only moves on to act another one out herself—picking up the labourer at the bar.    

Isabelle’s romances here form a critique of French sexual indulgence, especially in its cinema, which has long cornered the world market on free love. Hence the climactic appearance of French icon Gerard Depardieu at the end. In his first scene he appears — at first unidentifiable — with an unfamiliar woman on a date. He dismisses her. That is, he replays Isabelle’s hunger for a romantic connection, futilely searching for completion in yet another stranger.

In the next scene he’s revealed as Isabelle’s ostensible therapist — but he’s just a psychic! Aka quack. As he spews his intuitions about her various men she brightens in hope. But he’s only picking up on her responses to deliver what she wants to hear. 

Long the bad boy of French romantic cinema, here Depardieu as a bloated charlatan spews pop psych cliches that only re-enforce Isabelle's deluded quest for romantic perfection. He urges her to be — not “ouverte” but the American pop — “open” to whatever temptation arises.  
     That’s not admitting the sunshine she craves, but reinforcing her darkness. While the credits scroll down the left side of the screen, Depardieu continues the shallow “insight” she needs to continue her pathetic delusions. His running on and on confirms the satiric function of Depardieu's role. 

Denis provides a rather negative range of characters here. Two men stand apart, the gallery colleague and friend who patiently waits her to return his love and the black man wise enough to insist on taking time to see whether a relationship will naturally develop between them. For a full, healthy relationship we only have Isabelle’s friend’s report that she and her Jacques are taking the time and trouble to work patiently on a demanding and therefore rewarding connection, over time. Without the artist’s license, they’ve moved from nomad to gardener.