Video Dispatches: LET THE SUNSHINE IN

Video Dispatches is a regular column reviewing recent home video releases.

Let the Sunshine In (2017) – Criterion Collection

Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival after filming began just three months prior, and then made its way into American cinemas the following spring, just four months prior to the debut of Denis’ High Life at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.

Unfortunately, it felt like the critical cognoscenti (outside of a couple publications like Film Comment, who dedicated a cover story and podcast to the film) had barely started discussing Let the Sunshine In before they couldn’t help but speculate, anticipate and then meme-speak the hell out of the high-concept film that starred critic’s pet Robert Pattinson and apparently featured a lot of semen and a box dedicated to autoeroticism.

The way many TIFF-credentialed critics spoke about High Life — and thereby laying the groundwork for how it will continue to be discussed as it rolls through festivals and then local cinemas — seemed not only prudishly giggly, but perplexing — that these critics couldn’t believe that the filmmaker who had Vincent Gallo’s character ejaculate on-screen in Trouble Every Day or started her previous film with Juliette Binoche getting f*cked by a man she’s asking to cum would ever make such a sexually explicit film.

The salacious draw of High Life to an uninformed, puritanical critical apparatus was mixed with terribly deaf reviews of Let the Sunshine In from those same folks, reducing the film to its terribly misleading American title, which sounds like a phrase you can find pressed onto faux-salvaged wood for a Target-peddled domestic piece.

Indiewire critic David Ehrlich rounded it into his inane, unresearched, click-ready piece on “nicecore,” specifically calling it “accurately titled.” Matt Hoffman echoed those sentiments in the digital pages of Film School Rejects saying, “The film’s title and final scene suggest a sort of happy-go-lucky attitude. Perhaps for the first time, Claire Denis seems to be saying that love is out there, and it’s our job to let it in.”

I mention this to suggest that Denis’ film felt softly dismissed or critically valued as the minor work it might have looked like from the outside. After all, it doesn’t have the overbearing “seriousness” you could spot before sitting down to Bastards or White Material. And with the star-powered, native-language High Life on the horizon, it appears as if lazy critics were okay to treat Let the Sunshine In as an idle hands project Denis churned out between frying bigger fish.

Thankfully, there are those critics that aren’t as content to fall asleep at the wheel while reviewing a film by as significant a filmmaker as Denis. Nick Pinkerton, in particular, in what was one of the standout bits of film criticism in 2018, writes in painstaking detail to explicitly make a case for Let the Sunshine In as a major work for the filmmaker, and just generally for the medium.

Stephanie Zacharek also does well in her included essay to articulate what Denis visually articulates in what was often billed as the director’s take on the rom-com, saying she captures “a texture of joyous discontent, the sense of basically being happy with yourself as you are, yet feeling that the sea, which once rushed toward your feet, is subtly and gradually retreating … It’s as if the person inside you is no longer visible from the outside.”

Not only is it one of our current decade’s best films, it’s one of the brightest achievements from one of contemporary cinema’s defining filmmakers. Additionally, Denis’ collaborators, Agnes Godard and Binoche, turn out career-best work in tandem with each other — Binoche’s beautifully complex face befit Godard’s warm lighting and vice versa.

After a long wait for a domestic home video release — during which many speculated about a Criterion release — the boutique retailers haven’t disappointed. Perhaps the release’s greatest boon — next to an upgraded translation that removes the silly titular line (it would’ve been nice if they had/had been able to release it under it’s French title as well) — is Denis’ 30-minute short Voila l’enchainement (also scripted by Christine Agnot), a tete-a-tete between actors Alex Descas and Norah Krief, playing a tumultuous middle-aged couple.

Also included are newly filmed interviews with Denis and Binoche. The former’s is especially nice as she talks in depth about her collaborators, including Angot and how the story started as a Roland Barthes adaptation but grew into something else. She also expounds on Isabelle’s profession, wardrobe, what Etta James’ “At Last” means to the filmmaker, and plenty other things of interest.

Curzon previously put the film out on Blu-ray in the UK, which is reportedly also of fine visual quality, offering an image slightly brighter than the one here. Though I’m sure either is fine, one of the film’s defining characteristics is the aforementioned warmth with which it presents Binoche’s face or the sun coming in through curtains, so I may personally prefer a treatment that errs on the side of preserving that warmth.