From the Chicago Reader (October 12, 2017). In the Criterion Blu-Ray of this film, it’s refreshing to hear in Claire Denis’ and Juliette Binoche’s interviews about the film that they also consider it a sort of comedy. — J.R.
Let the Sunshine In (a stupid and misleading translation of the French title, Un beau soleil intérieur)
Loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’ nonfiction book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments — which dives into the absurd language of solitude and mythology that lovers and would-be lovers recite to themselves and others — this rapturous and faintly comic concerto for Juliette Binoche may well be the most pleasurable and original film Claire Denis has made since Beau Travail (1999). Binoche plays a divorced painter whom Denis pairs sexually, amorously, and/or tentatively with a succession of men played by everyone from Xavier Beauvois to Alex Descas to Gerard Depardieu. The filmmaker’s skill in framing her protagonist’s various trysts, moods, and dialogues, sometimes even setting them to music, is matchless. Novelist Christine Angot collaborated with Denis on the script. –- Jonathan Rosenbaum
Let’s start with the title — a shotgun marriage between two omnipresent yet far from equally featured players in these unremarked, meditative spaces: an abstract impulse that supposedly keeps our American republic healthy and vital (while producing a lot of junk along with more helpful items) and a concrete force softly caresses everything in its path, keeping us alive and alert. More specifically, an encounter between the cause of many of the deaths that are being commemorated here — especially those relating to the genocide of Native Americans and many of the massacres occasioned by slave revolts and labor protests — and what D.W. Griffith lamented he found missing from modern cinema, the wind in the trees, found in the vicinity of most of the dozens of gravesites visited.
Arguably, according to the poetic rhetoric proposed by this 58-minute film of 2007, beautifully restored by Mark Rance, these diverse and scattered gravesites — hidden in the woods or identified by plaques on busy highways or next to prominent buildings in towns or cities — belong to heroes rather than martyrs, yet also to moving air more than what we usually recognize today as history. Read more
Commissioned by the University of Chicago Press and written in September 2016; published in November 2017. — J.R.
For all the differences between the history of cinema and the history of the Internet, one disturbing point they have in common is the degree to which our canons in both film and film criticism are determined by historical accidents. Thus we’ve canonized F.W. Murnau’s third American film, City Girl (1930), ever since a copy was belatedly discovered in the 1970s, but not his second, The Four Devils (1928), because no known print of that film survives. Similarly, we canonize Josef von Sternberg’s remarkable The Docks of New York (1928), but not the lost Sternberg films that preceded and followed it, The Dragnet (1928) and The Case of Lena Smith (1929). And it’s no less a matter of luck that all my long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1987 and 2008, are available online, but none of Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the same publication, published between 1974 and 1986—a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist criticism in American journalism.
I hasten to add that, unlike the missing films of Murnau and Sternberg, Kehr’s writing for the Reader and Chicago has never been lost. Read more
