FRIDAY MARCH 1, BIJOU AUDITORIUM, 4:00 PM
SCREENING OF CLAIRE DENIS’S LET THE SUNSHINE IN
(Un beau soleil intérieur, France, 2017, 94’)
as part of the TOURNEES FILM FESTIVAL OF FRENCH-SPEAKING AND FRENCH-PRODUCED FILMS ON CAMPUS.
FEBRUARY 8-MARCH 9, 2019
Claire Denis, among the best loved and most influential French film-
makers of the last thirty years, teams with the famous and controversial novelist Christine Angot, to tell the story of Isabelle, a divorced Parisian artist played by the divine Juliette Binoche. Indirectly inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Denis pulls off a surprising balancing act between the eternal hiccups of desire and a light, occasionally fanciful comic touch (Gérard Depardieu’s appearance as a psychic is one for the history books). Driven by Binoche’s masterful performance, Let the Sunshine In takes the perspective of a woman driven to dating egotistical if not downright oafish men, delving into “the battle of the sexes,” and hinting at the malaise hanging over French society today. As always in a Claire Denis film, there comes a point when the angst gives way to a breathtaking dance scene: in this case, it is set to an Etta James song, and it is cinema in its purest, most sensual state.
“Binoche’s performance, as Isabelle, is largely responsible for unifying the film’s wildly diverging impulses with a solid core of calm and purpose. Her expressions are more than mercurial—they’re multilayered, with laughter and tears, tenderness and fury, confidence and bewilderment flowing together and coexisting in plain and simple moments of an iridescent mystery. Few films of such precisely and intricately calibrated effect feel as free, loose, and swingy.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Tournées screenings take place in the Bijou Auditorium as part of “Film Today” and “Film History”. They are free and open to the entire Institute.
Tournées Film Festival is made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), the French American Cultural Fund, Florence Gould Foundation and Highbrow Entertainment.
