Let the Sunshine In

“Let the Sunshine In” opens with Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) and Vincent (Xavier Beauvois) in bed. He expresses his desire to pleasure her; she says she has already been pleasured enough. Binoche’s line reading suggests she might not be telling the whole truth and Vincent’s line makes clear he is not listening anyway, a communication breakdown if there ever was one. Later, Isabelle, who is divorced and spends the whole movie on a search, or thereabouts, for love, or something like it, is out with a moody actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who spends the entire evening blathering about his insecurities and then tells her she should not have been forced to hear anything he had to say. “Finally,” she says just before they fall into bed. “No talk.” If, say, “Before Sunrise” was chock full of words searching for romantic meaning, so is “Let the Sunshine In”, though the latter sees its endless torrent of conversations as ultimately meaningless, dancing about architecture and all that. It is not words that drive Isabelle so much as urges.

The narrative follows those urges too, forgoing any kind of narrative structure, which, even if Isabelle often comes across trapped within the neurosis of her own mind, makes the film itself feel free. That freedom is furthered in director director Claire Denis’s elliptical structure, not just from scene to scene but within the whole movie itself, so that whenever you think you have a handle on where you are in the space time continuum, the whole thing flips. deliberately making a gorgeous mess of the notion of so many romantic comedies, which “Let the Sunshine In” is at its core, that neat and ordered storylines progress to true love. Indeed, Denis’s camera work furthers this notion, often jarring us by cutting to close-ups of Binoche mid-conversation, eliciting the sense that whatever’s being said to her is something she is struggling to square.

Yet even in those close-ups Binoche remains markedly distant, frequently looking away, never quite letting us all the way in. That might seem odd given how we spend the entire movie in her presence. But then, how do you get to know someone still in the process of figuring herself out, a remarkable assertion for a middle-aged character, allowing Isabelle the freedom to fuck up as much as any rom com twenty-something. This riddle is what prevents the movie from simply being a series of episodes in which a woman keeps placing herself in situations with terrible men. She shares blame too.

While Denis might not have traditional interest in the old proverb of the Meet Cute, she presents one anyway, on a dance floor where mysterious suitor suddenly appears to the strains of Etta James’s “At Last” as they just sort of fall into an elegantly primal dance. Denis allows the moment to last the entire song, a lyrical evocation of instant sexual attraction, and the joy with which Binoche allows Isabella to luxuriate in that desire is palpable. You almost wish it would end there as one song of bliss. It can’t, of course, so they see each other and when a friend, possible partner, questions this new suitor’s compatibility, it goads Isabelle into doing the same, a heartbreaking scene where Binoche manages to convey regret in the midst of the breakup itself, as if her character is willing herself to do something she does not necessarily believe in, still trying to make up her mind even after she ostensibly already has.

That air of synchronous confusion permeates “Let the Sunshine In”, right down to its conclusion, involving a Gérard Depardieu cameo, shot mostly in close-up, first in shadow and then gradually illuminated, underscoring how the scene gradually unwinds its truth, incredibly managing to live out its title even as it skewers that title too. I will not spoil it precisely, but suffice to say that it reorders things, a marvelous bit of subterfuge, existing as both a beginning and an end, or maybe an end and a beginning, depending on your half full/half empty mindset. And Binoche, bless her, splits the difference with a smile that summarizes the whole damn movie. Both things, as the political pundits are always advising these days, can be true.

Clouds of Sils Maria

The first shot of “Clouds of Sils Maria” finds Val, short for Valentine (Kristen Stewart), aboard a Eurorail, the camera shaking. Well, actually the camera is still; the train is causing the camera to shake. And this shaking ominously suggests a forthcoming shake-up in whatever movie world this is we are about to enter. Indeed, Val is the personal assistant of Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a famed actress on her way to a celebration honoring the writer, William Melchior, who helped trigger her upward professional trajectory. Alas, they learn Melchior has died, and he would probably be gleeful to learn his own death functions in the context of “Clouds of Sils Maria” as mere symbolism, the portent of our leading lady’s doom. A celebration becomes a memorial.

That memorial takes fairly overt form in a revival of the play that twenty-some years ago put Maria a on the map wherein she rivetingly played the part of a youthful ingénue in a complicated starry-eyed relationship with an older actress. Now, of course, the director wants Maria to reverse roles. Her former part will be played by JoAnn, a rising American star prone to fits of volatile public hysteria, played exquisitely by Chloe Grace Moretz with a kind of European art house spin on the Miley Cyrus phenomenon. She is fresh off some ginormous if vapid sci-fi flick and now embroiled in scandal as the other woman in an affair with an English writer who, frankly, doesn’t seem like he can keep up with her. Come to think of it, JoAnn more than a little resembles the off screen travails, fair or not (not), of one Kristen Stewart. You half expect that she will encounter the Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” in some sort of perverted cinematic séance.

It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when reality, the old curmudgeonly term of the movie reviewing lexicon, departs “Clouds of Sils Marias.” When Val runs lines with Maria, director Olivier Assayas often enters the moment mid-rehearsal, with scripts tucked out of sight, a disorienting effect that means we can’t be certain if they are merely reciting dialogue or legitimately having a row, and therefore effectively eliciting a sensation of being both. Veracity blends with fiction, which is the eerie, wonderful plain on which this whole dreamy movie rests. After all, art, as Val lectures her employer, is an “interpretation of life that can be truer than life itself”, a line worthy of eye-rolls until you hear the way Ms. Stewart says it, with so much earnestness that it counteracts the naivety. “Clouds of Sils Maria” may be sentient but it never devolves into self-impressed self-awareness.

As with any film concerning the acting industry, “Clouds of Sils Marias” invites comparisons to the grand dame of showbiz satires “All About Eve”, even if they are far from the same film. That was a backstage drama dipped in battery acid, a schemer conniving to crush a starlet, the perpetual cycle of the performer. The fall from grace here, however, is inevitable rather than accelerated, a piercing and gloriously puzzling portrait of an actress’s careers suddenly becoming enveloped in the fog of age, emblemized quite insistently, but no less breathlessly, by the clouds of the title, the so-called Majola Snake, a kind of smoke ring that pours through the canyons of the Swiss Alps where they are hiding out.

Considering that Maria has re-ascended the stage in the wake of dressing up for a superhero movie, her character bears hallmarks of Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thompson, the focal point of last year’s Academy Award winning “Birdman.” Yet that was a film heightened to the point of grandiosity. Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), called him on the carpet, yes, to try provide counterweight to the opening shot of his levitation and all that sleight-of-hand (or not) entailed. Yet the film’s final shot seemed to suggest she believed he could fly, giving over to the illusion of the movie star, a deliberate sacrificing of the film’s final thread of tangibility. Val, however, is and remains the emotional and professional ballast of Maria, counseling and coddling her employer to remain in the play when she wants out. Val sees value in attacking the same work from a different vantage point, to opening one’s self up to another reading, to using art as a kind of working through, and when something happens to Val toward the second act's end, it intentionally feels as if that working-through has become unmoored.

The push & pull between these two women winds up as the film’s prominent feature, the question of who’s wisest being blurred. When Val proclaims that a performance in a dunderheaded Hollywood blockbuster can carry just as much spiritual weight as a hoity-toity art film, it’s incredible to witness not only for the way in which this hoity-toity art film is going to bat for dunderheaded Hollywood blockbusters, but for the zealous optimism with which Val professes it. In the end, it’s not simply the years that have been automatically stripped from Maria, it’s the ideals, and the idea that we accumulate wisdom with age disappears like the landscape to the Majola Snake.