Critics reviews

Among the many delights of Claire Denis’s tender-erratic romantic gauntlet is Duvauchelle’s self-involved theater actor nonchalantly guzzling beer after beer while half-heartedly romancing Juliette Binoche’s nominally interested artist at a bourgie bar following a performance.

“The spell was cast,” croons Etta James in “At Last,” that timeless tune of love as a hard-won refuge from loneliness. Under a spell of her own, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) sways to its strings with a fish-mouthed workingman she has just met in a scene so sincere it feels sublime.

Shuffling through the af fairs of a luminous Juliette Binoche—the consummated, ended, teased, pursued, and frustrated alike—Claire Denis’s comedy also captures the contours of life as experienced, leaving no class, age, or female-ambition stone unturned.

The film imperceptibly slides toward maturity and becomes more profound but less eventful, as Binoche settles into calmness without giving up her quest for love.

Binoche is as good as she’s ever been, and no film in 2018 will match Sunshine’s amazing, inscrutable ending sequence, the precise meaning of which is worth talking and arguing about for hours; at a moment when most movies for grown-ups take pains to underline their themes and corner their own arguments, Denis nudges us to “be open.”

On the most basic level, Let the Sunshine In is a wry, deeply enjoyable picture about the cursed horror of dating and how desire drives us even when we wish it wouldn’t. But Denis and Binoche go even further: Binoche’s face, its radiance both celestial and lived-in, is itself an elegant question, an amalgam of Who am I? What do I want? and Where can I find it?

The frustration of watching someone get her hopes up over and over, against her better judgment, gives the film its streak of awkward, absurdist comedy, brilliantly displayed in its most prolonged date scene, which travels a traditional rom-com trajectory from bar to car to bedroom.

Denis co-wrote the script of “Let the Sunshine In” with the novelist Christine Angot; it’s filled with sharply revealing and loftily aria-like dialogue, and Denis invents a form that seems to frame the discourse as if the images were a sort of operatic music.

The film is worthy of study for the script alone—and for the pinwheeling emotional turns and sudden flashes of feeling Denis and Angot concoct for Isabelle, which reveal as much to us as they seem to reveal to her.

For a film that's clearly meant to be experimental and fragmentary . . . Let the Sunshine In moves between dialogue and carnal interludes with rhythmic fluidity. The mostly nocturnal settings and sumptuous black and red palette intensify Binoche's soulful sensuality.

What’s startling about the [opening] scene is not its explicitness. It’s the way the characters are framed, in medium closeup, in compositions that emphasis the space between their faces as much if not more than their faces. . . . This is the touch of a cinematic master. Claire Denis is the writer and director of this film, and she surely is this thing, as is her collaborator, the cinematographer Agnés Godard.

Ms. Binoche is the film’s primary and sufficient source of light. The radiance is all hers. The clouds, too.