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The Exquisite Talk of Claire Denis’s “Let the Sunshine In”

By Richard Brody

Claire Denis ’s new film, “Let the Sunshine In,” which opened last Friday, is a very simple story of an enormous complexity. It’s a romantic comedy and drama in which the questioning of those very categories is a part of the action. The movie stars Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, an artist living in a gentrified, once-industrial part of Paris, moving ahead in work (including a new agreement with a prominent gallery owner) and tangled up in love. It starts with Isabelle and a lover naked in bed, a corpulent man heaving and thrusting on top of her, but even here, where the action is incontrovertibly physical, the scene is shaped by the dialogue, which lands with the pugnacious power of smacks.

The man, Victor (Xavier Beauvois), is a wealthy banker; she begins to find their relationship disgusting and, though his disgusting traits are part of his appeal to her, she breaks it off vehemently and moves on. She becomes romantically involved with an unnamed actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle); an ex, François Mandelbaum, whom she keeps inviting back (Laurent Grévill); and a rough-hewn man named Sylvain (Paul Blain), whom she meets dancing in a night club. Isabelle’s life leaps ahead, from adventure to adventure, from encounter to encounter, with an ironic abruptness. Her relationships, though physical (and Denis doesn’t shrink from depictions of sexual behavior), pivot on fine emotional points of an exquisite yet piercing hilarity—on the edge of humor and pain—and they’re developed largely through dialogue, which is the heart of the film.

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 dialogue of the film takes place at two levels throughout—it’s performed by the actors and pertains with an intense psychological specificity (and complexity) to the movie’s characters, who are rendered, as a result, exceptionally vivid and present even in fleeting appearances. But that dialogue is also a constant flow of mental and emotional energy, a seeming plasma that circulates around, among, and through the characters (and through Denis, Angot, the actors, and the crew—through the world of the film itself); that intense dynamic flux is as much the motor of the film as the specific traits and plans of characters. That’s why, for all the talk, and for all the psychology, “Let the Sunshine In” has a fierce, urgent physical power throughout, and why, for all its keen emphasis on the dramas of its characters, they seem to be part of a wider world throughout and Denis herself seems almost physically present in that world; if there’s a film where “the word made flesh” were the slogan of an artistic principle, this is it.

Isabelle’s relationships are complicated, and their turmoil sparkles with comedic confusions at many levels, from the blithering unintentional self-contradictions and repetitions to the higher ironies of happy accidents. She leaves the banker and gets involved with the actor, who then wishes that he hadn’t, that he’d waited. (Denis cuts from Isabelle’s gauzy, dreamlike, post-coital rapture to the actor’s slap-like declaration, into the camera, as if from Isabelle’s point of view, that he thinks they shouldn’t have rushed into a sexual relationship.) She occasionally has sex with the white-haired and stubbly-bearded François, but doesn’t want to get back together with him—yet she’s also prepared to break off a working relationship with her new gallery dealer over a rumor that François had had an affair with her. François is also the father of their daughter, Cécile, who’s ten, and who functions in the film as a brilliant ellipsis. Cécile’s near-total absence provides a nonsentimental view of motherhood—she’s seen only briefly, waving to Isabelle from the back seat of François’s car, but she’s nonetheless a crucial lever of power that François uses in his coercive dealings with Isabelle.

While on a weekend jaunt to a friend’s country estate (giving rise to the movie’s most sublimely frenzied comedic inspiration, Isabelle’s tirade against a rich man’s vain pride in ownership), she meets Sylvain, a man from a working-class milieu. Isabelle lives in freedom and comfort, she frequents the beau monde; she displays a warm personal interest in people from other backgrounds. But when Sylvain comes into her life, Denis doesn’t stint on or soft-pedal Isabelle’s own trouble forming an authentic, nonjudgmental bond with him.

“Let the Sunshine In” is also a peculiarly insightful glimpse into the emotional fluidity within the formal boundaries of French culture, which differs drastically from the sharp boundaries within the supposed fluidity of American life. In particular, lines between work and personal life that are flaming red in American life seem not to factor in Isabelle’s world, as in a scene in which she goes backstage to a theatre for a meeting with the unnamed actor. They’re meeting about an unspecified project; he soon complains about his work, then explains that his marriage is ending, goes into detail on his conflicts at home, and adds that it’s “fortuitous” that he met Isabelle just then. Though she looks increasingly panic-stricken and draws the conversation back to their project, she also suggests that they get dinner and, after an extraordinary set of push-and-pull passive aggression and rope-a-dope verbal wrangling, she invites him back to her home, where, along with sex, they have an extraordinary meta-conversation about the conversation that they’re not having.

The movie’s abrupt transitions, characters’ sudden appearances and disappearances, dialogue that picks up and drops off midstream, actions caught on the wing and abandoned en route, create a jolting sense of daily life as an effort to dance on a balance beam being shaken by beloved clowns. Yet the movie’s mercurial haphazardness has a sense of overarching inevitability, an emotional logic that turns Isabelle’s character, her inner life, into a dramatic structure in itself. The rhythms of “Let the Sunshine In” are those of screwball comedy, but the emotions are those of a bare-nerve vulnerability. The film extends beyond the bounds of its intimate action to conjure a vast, resonant, overarching vision of a world at large, of the times as filtered through a single consciousness and its unconscious overtones, emanations, reverberations, and premonitions. That air of metaphysical order crystallizes in Denis’s brilliant, near-quarter-hour culminating scene of Isabelle’s visit to a clairvoyant, played with a gruffly arrogant self-assurance by the ferocious Gérard Depardieu, who tells Isabelle’s future (and offers her a vision that involves the movie’s actual French title, “Un Beau Soleil Intérieur”—A Beautiful Inner Sun). He also offers her a final word—the English word “open”—which, in a way, retrospectively orients the movie’s disparate details.

For Denis, character traits aren’t limits or definitions but springboards for ardent observational curiosity. In a scene at a bar with Isabelle, Victor brazenly displays his assholishness in his curt, condescending, and punctilious orders to a young bartender, but Denis doesn’t pin him to the wall with it—she derives a wry pleasure from watching him overmanage the event (“gluten-free olives”) and devises a puckishly simple yet exotic visual strategy to film it (a pendular camera move that arcs back and forth around Victor and Isabelle) and tops it off with a crude sexual stinger. In bed with François, in the midst of playful and tender mutual pleasure, Isabelle is jolted by—and challenges and mocks—his unexceptional new sexual move that Denis’s camera (wielded by the cinematographer Agnès Godard, her longtime collaborator) picks up as if with a sly wink.

The film is very loosely inspired by Roland Barthes ’s “A Lover’s Discourse,” the original title of which is “Fragments d’un discours amoureux.” The time frame is fragmented, leaping and lurching ahead in time and around in space. The variety of scenes offer fragments within fragments of discourse, with ingenious, impulsive dialogue spliced with things overheard and remembered, shooting off into unexpected directions like fireworks. 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.

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By Jackson Arn

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The movie begins with a startling, intimate sex scene. A hefty middle-aged man is making love with an attractive middle-aged woman. He is avidly concerned with bringing her to orgasm, each one worries that the other is worried that the other is taking too long—“I feel good. I’m good,” insists one of them— the sex ends in resignation. What’s startling about the scene is not its explicitness, which is not inordinate. 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. (One is reminded of Elie Faure’s writing on Velasquez, quoted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard ’s “Pierrot Le Fou.”)

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. “Let The Sunshine In” (the title is a horrifically bad translation/transposition of a pertinent phrase that is uttered in the last scene of the film) soon puts these characters into clothes and in conversation. The woman is Isabelle, a successful visual artist and divorced mom, played by the always astonishing Juliette Binoche . The man is Vincent, a married banker who’s got his stubby piggish fingers in the art world, and enjoys baiting Isabelle with who-slept-with-who gossip about gallery owners and former lovers. Vincent, incarnated with spectacular relish by Xavier Beauvois (the actor and filmmaker best known here for directing 2010’s “Of Gods And Men”) is a real piece of work, arrogant without end, a grotesquely pedantic and condescending whiskey snob (they’re worse than wine snobs if you can imagine such a thing) who in one scene requests a bartender bring him “gluten-free olives.” He is the first in a series of lovers whom Isabelle contends with in this.

Like Muddy Waters , Isabelle can’t be satisfied. The viewer is perhaps meant to drop their jaw at seeing this attractive woman stuck on a contained boor such as Vincent, but her reason, which she lets on late in the movie, makes perfect if perverse sense. After establishing some distance from him, she has a frustrating drinks-and-dinner session with an unnamed stage actor with whom she wishes to collaborate on an unnamed project. Even after he admits his alcoholism to her, she engineers an awkward seduction; their post-coital relationship feels more like boxers in a ring refusing to approach each other rather than a romantic or sexual affinity.

The film continues to chronicle Isabelle’s struggles. This isn’t a story of a smart woman making bad decisions; Denis’ mind isn’t as simplistic as that. The director has treated a pretty wide variety of topics over the course of her long and wonderful career. Female desire, as it happens, is not one she’s looked into often. 2002’s “Friday Night” was the last time she took it on quite so directly. In that film, a young woman on the verge of entering a permanent union found herself in circumstances that allowed her a brief escape that could also have been an epiphany. In this film, Isabelle, as beautiful and smart as she is, feels herself constricted by forces she can’t even confront. Is it the most appropriate thing for her, at her age, to live, as she puts it, a “life without desire?”

Clearly no. But the film does confront the fact that particularly for women, pursuing desire in middle age is a fraught path. To add a twist to this demonstration, Denis breaks it off late in the movie, and jumps briefly into someone else’s storyline, someone who had been a stranger up to this point. Then the filmmaker wraps it up in a final shot that’s both cerebral, whimsical and wry in its wisdom. The film’s confidence comes in part from the acceptance of the things that can’t be known. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Let the Sunshine In (2018)

Juliette Binoche as Isabelle

Xavier Beauvois as Vincent

Philippe Katerine as Mathieu

Josiane Balasko as Maxime

Gérard Depardieu as Le voyant

Alex Descas as L'homme Fin

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• Juliette Binoche Glows in Bittersweet <i>Let the Sunshine In</i>

Juliette Binoche Glows in Bittersweet Let the Sunshine In

A s we clamor to celebrate female filmmakers in the U.S., let’s not forget those who have been working for years in France. Claire Denis ( Beau Travail , Friday Night ) is one of the best of those, and her latest film, Let the Sunshine In , is a multifaceted, bittersweet delight.

A superb Juliette Binoche plays Isabelle, a middle-aged artist who has split from–though still occasionally sleeps with–her longtime partner and is wondering what her next act might be. Neither a moody, preening actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) nor the oafish married banker (Xavier Beauvois) who tells her, “You’re charming, but my wife is extraordinary” deserve her. 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 eternal asking of those questions, frustrating as they can be, is their own answer.

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Let the Sunshine In review – a departure for Claire Denis

T he latest film from Claire Denis couldn’t be more French if it was smoking Gauloises and wearing a Breton top. A scrapbook of the wryly observed failed relationships of Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), it’s talky (incessantly so at times), knowing and ironic. It’s also unexpectedly light in tone. “Frothy” is something of a departure for Denis, best known for the savage poetry of films such as Beau Travail and White Material . You keep expecting to discover a razor blade embedded in the soap. But none appears. Neither, in this skittish flit from break-up to brush-off, does the film give us much to get our teeth into apart from Binoche’s mercurial and pleasingly readable performance.

Divorced artist Isabelle is certainly beguiling. The film’s seemingly endless queue of slavering French men can’t be wrong. Wearing their midlife crises like optimistically trendy haircuts, Isabelle’s suitors talk themselves in and out of her bed. Meanwhile, a score of laid-back jazz wafts through the film like the smoke from a post-coital cigarette.

Although the material is conventional, Denis’s approach, at least, is interesting. The trajectories of relationships are interrupted, and we build up a fractured portrait of Isabelle and her romantic life from snapshots rather than an in-depth examination of a single encounter. It’s not wholly satisfying. For all the scenes of Isabelle, moist-eyed, contemplating her latest breakup, there’s a flippancy here that adds a veneer to the film, making it a struggle to access any real emotional depth. But then, it wouldn’t be a Claire Denis film if it didn’t make us work a little.

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Let the Sunshine In Is a Very French Romantic Comedy

Claire Denis’s new film, starring Juliette Binoche as a divorcée navigating love in Paris, is full of horror and swooning possibility.

2018 in film has already seen its fair share of spine-tingling horror: Think of the blind alien beasts of A Quiet Place or the psychedelic, sinister “Shimmer” of Annihilation . But nothing in this delightfully varied year of cinema has terrified me quite as much as the French dating scene, at least as presented in Claire Denis’s wonderful—sometimes joyous, and other times wrenching—comedy Let the Sunshine In . As a director, Denis has long been unafraid to point her camera at stark brutality, making movies about colonial atrocities, cannibalistic vampires, and civil wars. So I suppose it’s no surprise that her take on a romantic comedy occasionally had me recoiling in my seat.

Let the Sunshine In isn’t exactly as chilling as that sounds; it’s just far more frank on the subjects of love, sex, and human connection than most films in the genre are. The story follows Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), a divorced woman seemingly having a mild mid-life crisis, as she navigates the joys, anxieties, and cruelties of dating with various flawed (if intermittently appealing) partners. The movie is lightly inspired by the romantic travails of Denis’s co-writer Christine Angot, a controversial French novelist, but it also drew from Roland Barthes’s 1977 work of philosophy A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments . In short, Let the Sunshine In is a unique, spellbinding work, worthy of comparison to Denis’s best films.

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Isabelle is an artist living in Paris and sharing custody of her 10-year-old daughter with her ex-husband (also an artist). But for most of the film, she is alone—rattling around a cozy apartment and meeting her friends, and romantic interests, for dinner or drinks. Let the Sunshine In is mostly powered by conversation, but it hits hardest when people stop talking. That’s true in the film’s arresting opening scene where Isabelle has sex with Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), a portly middle-aged banker who aggressively focuses on trying to give her an orgasm, ignoring her quiet protestations that she already feels good.

Denis renders the encounter intimately while acknowledging the distance between the partners, keeping Binoche’s face in the frame as much as possible. It’s a depiction of uninspired lovemaking that doesn’t fully tip into frightening or slapstick territory; there’s comedy to be found here, sure, but also disappointment, angst, and a hope for something better. In the viewer’s later encounters with Vincent, he comes off as a bit more monstrous (he’s nasty and arrogant toward bartenders and waiters while on his dates with Isabelle). But Denis hinted at his hidden abrasiveness from the start.

In addition to Vincent, there are several other men in Isabelle’s orbit. There’s an unnamed actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) struggling with alcoholism; though his emotional connection with Isabelle is immediate, he has profound struggles with intimacy. There’s also a salt-of-the-earth fellow named Sylvain (Paul Blain) who woos Isabelle at a bar but depresses all of her friends with his supposed lack of intellect. There’s the retiring Marc (Alex Descas), who’s in Isabelle’s friend-zone but sometimes seems like he’d make for a better husband. And then there’s her actual ex-husband, Francois (Laurent Grevill), whose bond with Isabelle is undeniable but comes with a lot of lingering disputes.

Every dynamic has its own fraught issues and an enchanting sense of possibility. By digging into the bleaker side of things, Denis lends the movie a healthy groundedness, and Binoche’s performance is so captivatingly human, it keeps the entire enterprise on track. Yes, Isabelle is sometimes sad, sometimes wracked with confusion and self-doubt, and often makes bad decisions. But she’s always trying to seek out what is meaningful and true in the world.

One minute Isabelle’s laughing and dancing (an extended set piece involving Etta James’s “At Last” is a fantastic interlude); the next she’s crying and bemoaning the death of her love life. Both states of mind feel equally believable. There’s no typical sense of forward momentum to Let the Sunshine In , but the same could be said of everyday existence. Denis’s foray into the often-goofy world of the rom-com is at once a cold bath of realism and a bewitching portrait of the power of love—however fleeting that feeling may be.

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Let the Sunshine In Reviews

The presence of Binoche in Let the Sunshine In is a bit of brilliance that taunts and challenges the viewer...

Full Review | Nov 8, 2023

It’s admirable and eminently sympathetic, and I was exhausted by the end. This is not a bad thing.

Full Review | Jan 10, 2023

It's a thoughtful, serious, and multilayered film of teary-eyed breakdowns and fleeting bursts of elation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2022

Watch this for Denis and Binoche, a wonderful collaboration.

Full Review | Oct 12, 2021

Binoche's intimate performance as the perpetual victim of her own poor judgement and self-defeating relationship negotiations is convincingly obsessive, while Denis shows skill and insight...

It all builds up to an unexpected but charming ending...

Denis is trying something different...I adore it. Let the Sun Shine In feels much looser and lighter than her other films but it still retains all of her visual language and style.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

[Claire Denis's] skill in framing her protagonist's various trysts, moods, and dialogues, sometimes even setting them to music, is matchless.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2020

The flirty fizz of the genre comes with a shot of top-shelf pathos; the laughs are few and the sighs are heavy.

Full Review | Feb 14, 2020

What director Claire Denis and her co-screenwriter Christine Angot clearly set out to do... is to present a stinging diatribe against the awfulness of dating and the scarcity of decent, sensitive men. And on that level, it succeeds spectacularly.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2019

Although there's certainly never been any doubt as to the range of La Binoche, the performer shoulders the entire fragile frame of the narrative with stunning aplomb, walking a fine line between relatability and unhinged desperado of amour fou.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 10, 2019

Frustrated or not, [Juliette] Binoche shines bright in this film.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2019

Juliette Binoche is typically terrific in what proves to be a middling effort from esteemed writer-director Claire Denis.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 2, 2019

Stay open to life, never close down. To me, Let The Sunshine In seems a great film.

Full Review | May 1, 2019

Binoche's tender, honest exploration of Isabelle's emotional roller coaster will resonant deeply for many women.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 24, 2019

The filmmaker and her character are equally untethered, enquiring women, not so much concerned with securing a definitive answer as engaging with the possibilities raised by their searches.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 11, 2019

Binoche is amazingly good in this role and it's no small thing for a contemporary film to celebrate the sexuality of a middle-aged woman. But Juliette's self-absorption becomes somewhat tiresome after a while.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 26, 2019

It's a story about people who spend more time talking about their lives than inhabiting them.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 23, 2019

From the interior of Binoche, is where the beautiful light comes from (whitish, like a beautiful autumn day) to which the title refers and which, at the same time, is what actually illuminates this charming film by Denis. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 18, 2019

Demonstrates that realistic behavior -- self-defeating whims, conversations that go nowhere, distracted small talk, a visit with a psychic that is more banal than dramatic -- is so alien to the moviegoing experience that most viewers cannot recognize it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 7, 2019

Movies | ‘Let the Sunshine In’ review: Juliette Binoche,…

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The film itself isn’t dorky in the least. It’s an elegant and witty rumination on one woman’s quest for romantic fire. Director Denis pays close, amused attention to the way Isabelle, the Parisian artist played by Juliette Binoche, responds to the familiar blather of the men in her life — their dodges, their defense mechanisms, the way they wheedle and charm their way into her bed.

The film’s protagonist isn’t meant to beguile the audience; she’s simply an interesting tangle of impulses. Denis and co-writer Christine Angot have more on their minds than passive victimhood. I’m not sure Binoche would know how to play that, in any case. Rather, “Let the Sunshine In” allows Isabelle plenty of room to make active variations on the same mistake over and over, the way we all do because we’re human and our hearts are fools, rushing toward the next problem. Binoche’s performance is extraordinarily alert and alive to each encounter.

Denis’ first image is that of Isabelle on her back, naked from the waist up, waiting for her uninspiring banker lover (Xavier Beauvois) to finish. He does so, but not before thoughtlessly goading her with questions about her previous lover. Then, a few seconds later, as he’s dressing: “See you Sunday?”

The banker, patently boorish and arrogant, is married; Isabelle, divorced, has a daughter whom she shares with her ex-husband (Laurent Grevill). Another one of her current, uncertainly committed lovers (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is an actor, also married, also, probably, for good. Over several drinks, he acknowledges his drinking problem, a short temper, a hint of violence. His life, he tells her, has become a grind. Their encounter leaves them on different, distant shores.

Tilt it one way, and “Let the Sunshine In” becomes a dramatic portrait of a woman’s sensual restlessness. Tilted the other way, it’s a bittersweet romantic comedy. (At one point the banker informs Isabelle that she’s conducting herself like “a tacky bedroom farce.”) The film keeps weaving back and forth, intriguingly. Some shots are simply beautiful in their formal rightness; there’s a two-minute take, for example, of an early scene in a quiet bar between Binoche and Beauvois, capturing brilliantly the push and pull of two people not quite right for each other. “It’s just not feasible,” she says to herself, later, distraught, after her latest tryst. The line comes just as she’s having trouble removing her thigh-high, spiked-heel boots, and it’s a rich moment.

Her actor friend dismisses their attraction even as it’s happening, saying “it isn’t a love thing.” The film is, though. That phrase is the film in a nutshell, and watching Binoche trying to crack it affords a vaguely disquieting but very real sense of satisfaction.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @phillipstribune

“Let the Sunshine In” — 3.5 stars

No MPAA rating (some nudity and language)

Running time: 1:35

Opens: Friday at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; musicboxtheatre.com.

RELATED: From 2010, the Tribune’s Michael Phillips reviews Claire Denis’ ‘White Material’ starring Isabelle Huppert “

Tribune review of Claire Denis’ sinister film noir ‘Bastards’ “

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‘Let the Sunshine In’ Film Review: Juliette Binoche Looks for Love With All the Wrong Men

Director Claire Denis wonders if midlife crises aren’t limited to a certain age — and what if love, itself, is the crisis?

Claire Denis’ loopy, tongue-in-cheek romantic comedy “Let the Sunshine In” stars Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, a contemporary French artist who becomes nearly obsessed with her search for love. Or lust. Whichever is within reach.

Isabelle jumps from one lover’s arms to another’s like there’s hot lava on the floor, and they are her safehaven of dry land. And dry so many of them are. The first is Vincent (actor-filmmaker Xavier Beauvois), a married banker with a jealous streak who negs Isabelle like he took a weekend course from The Pickup Artist. In one scene at a bar, he fills her up with backhanded compliments about how great it is that she feels comfortable doing such frivolous things like making art, while he tasks the bartender with completing arbitrary requests, like setting down a bottle of Perrier in exactly the right way.

Luckily, Isabelle ditches this guy, but she’s not single for long. Another lover — also married — quickly gets under her skin when what begins as an artists’ work meeting turns very personal very quickly. The guy (Nicolas Duvauchelle, Denis’ “White Material”) is an actor and is consistently referred to as simply “L’acteur.” Over the course of a single beer, he delivers an unprompted and seemingly endless monologue about all of his violent fugue states and “bad-boy” tendencies as Isabelle just waits for her turn to talk.

This multi-scene courtship is painful to watch, because both characters neurotically dance around their attraction to one another in a manner that manifests itself into hostility and anger, and so both won’t shut up, even though they’re not really saying anything at all, until they finally ravage one another, and Isabelle says what I was feeling myself: “God, I thought the talking would never end.”

But L’acteur is no good, either. Isabelle longs for something real but continually seeks out the fiction, the relationship that’s bound to blow up in her face. She’s got a perfectly good choice of a man in Francois (Laurent Grévill, Denis’ “Bastards”), with whom she has a child, but this is a woman whose enemy is perfection; she’s addicted to the beginning of a relationship but instinctively runs at the first sign of trouble, even if the trouble is something she’s manufactured herself. Isabelle is the friend you must convince that every happy couple endures hard times.

The cracks begin to show in Isabelle’s pleasant façade when she accepts an invitation for a trip into the country. In one pivotal moment, she loses it on an hours-long property tour, screaming and howling for the inane conversation to stop, but nobody seems to care, as they all have a great time later at the bar. She’s mercurial, and this film is as much a statement about the temperament of artists as it is about love. An artist can fly off the handle in rage, and yet her friends think nothing of this emotion, which is sure to be as fleeting as her romances.

The only cardinal sin an artist can commit, according to Isabelle’s artist friends, is being with someone who is not also an artist, who would never understand this impetuous lifestyle. When Isabelle sleeps with a man who sweeps her off her feet at a bar and then has him move in with her, the artist community is in a panic: Has this guy even painted anything before?

And though Gérard Dépardieu only shows up for the finale of the film, as a psychic truth-teller, he’s the perfect tag to this story, this personal quest of Isabelle’s that shows absolutely no signs of ending anytime soon. Of course she goes to the psychic. Of course she wants him to give her an easy answer (one she will inevitably ignore or contradict after a while anyway), a way to predict the future and cut out the hard parts of learning and growing.

Binoche being in her 50s also brings more meaning to this film, which showcases the fact that the manic search for connection one feels in their 20s doesn’t just disappear with age. There’s no magical time when a person suddenly feels satisfied and does not wonder if possibly there is more to life and love than the day-in, day-out doldrums.

When films are made about straight men in this predicament, they’re often considered explorations of a “midlife crisis,” but Denis’ film poses the questions: What if crises aren’t limited to a certain age, and what if love itself is the crisis?

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NYFF 2017: Let the Sunshine In

by Vadim Rizov in Festivals & Events on Oct 11, 2017

Christine Angot , Claire Denis , Let the Sunshine In , New York Film Festival , New York Film Festival 2017 , NYFF , NYFF 2017

At Cannes, Claire Denis’s  Let the Sunshine In (subtitled  Bright Sunshine In on the DCP) premiered to many nonplussed reactions. By some considerable measure her talkiest film, Sunshine tracks a painter, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), as she slams straight from one romantic dalliance into another. That is, effectively, the entire plot: there are a few scenes that do not involve men, but in general the film marches inexorably and restlessly through a series of failed partnerships. The dance and sex scenes are very familiar — Denis still gets defamiliarizingly close to skins and heads — but the rest is not, necessarily. Denis has a track record of being refreshingly nonjudgmental about hooking up ( Friday Night is an all-time classic on the topic), and she hasn’t suddenly turned condemnatory, but this is not a happy film — Isabelle wants a relationship, or says she does, but marching through a sea of men defective in one way or another does nothing for morale.

Denis’s film hit NYFF a few months before the first publication of her co-writer Christine Angot’s work in English — fortuitous for me, since I’ve written so much about Denis over the years that it felt like I’d totally run out of new material. Reading  Incest (copies are out there already) clarifies some things about where  Sunshine is coming from. A controversial cultural institution in France, Angot practices auto-fiction; the title should be taken literally, but it takes a while to get there. Much of the book marches through a relationship and its end, taking the effective form of a long nervous breakdown. A typical excerpt: “She was crying, I had prepared some lines to read to her: Everything in this world is suffering, only love is a reason to live, Racine tells us it’s forbidden. And to explain my recent behavior, Dario Fo: the love of paradox, as is well known, often leads to inconsistency.” This furious jumble of impulse, where attraction and repulsion don’t quite negate each other, is the film’s subject, and while Isabelle isn’t precisely Angot, she’s not that far off as far as I can tell.

In the book, Angot notes a particular fondness for Jean Eustache, especially  The Mother and the Whore , one of the all-time classics of sexual restlessness. It took me a few weeks to figure out what else  Let the Sunshine In reminded me of:  Looking For Mr. Goodbar , an atrociously made but still fascinating relic from 1977. Diane Keaton plays a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants but knows precisely what what she  doesn’t want, which leads her on a series of hook-ups. The film is disgustingly punitive in its endgame, but it’s worth seeing just for Keaton’s ferocious performance as a woman who will exhaust and endanger herself rather than ever settle.  Sunshine is like that, except much better made and without a moral hammer coming down at the end.

It is also, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, a good companion piece to the Garrel and twin Hongs also playing at this year’s NYFF. No surprise that Denis is an on-the-record admirer of both, but til now, her work has never reminded me of them. This is an obdurate film, but in a new way for her: not the bad-mood provocation of  Bastards or the structurally foreboding  The Intruder , but relentless in its march from one man to the next, compressing or eliding the connective tissue of other parts of daily life entirely (it’s impossible to tell what stretch of time  Sunshine covers). It’s admirable and eminently sympathetic, and I was exhausted by the end. This is not a bad thing.

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Let the Sunshine In Is a Heady, Cream-Puff-Light Interrogation of Romance

During an escape to the countryside with her bougie art friends, painter Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) finally snaps. While the Parisians ooh and ahh and offer their cerebral takes on the virtues of nature and the benefits of getting out of the city, she stomps off. “This landscape is yours! Everything is yours! Everything!” Her friends look at her in bewilderment, but let her go. By the next scene, she’s drinking Champagne at a local bar, mellowed out, ready for the next stranger to walk into her life and dazzle her.

That this is how Isabelle, divorced, unlucky in love, and deeply lonely, finally voices her long-percolating outburst is what makes Claire Denis’ s warm, wise, somewhat unexpected foray into a kind of romantic comedy a Claire Denis film. Using Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse as a jumping off point for the script, Let the Sunshine In feels cream-puff light, but is deceptively rigorous, and about so much more than one woman’s quest to find the One. It’s about all the fragments that compose what may broadly be called romance: the highs and lows, the momentary obsessions, the endless dialogues that eventually must give way to ecstasy or disappointment.

In some ways, that makes it diametrically opposed to the mainstream romantic comedy, with its narrative symmetry and talk for talk’s sake. After a nice date with a moody actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and the start of a romance that both parties manage to psychoanalyze their way out of pursuing by the end of the night, they finally embrace, and their neurotic back-and-forth suddenly gives way to the sound of their kisses. “It feels so good to stop all that talking,” Isabelle sighs. It’s fascinating to see Denis, who certainly knows when to go nonverbal in order to reach the sublime, translate that sensibility onto such a seemingly quotidien emotional narrative.

As Isabelle floats from one would-be love to the next — the well-to-do banker who fetishizes her bohemian existence (Xavier Beauvois), the sympathetic art-world colleague who is perhaps too polite and convenient (Alex Descas) — the film rides the tide of the joy and exhaustion of other people intuitively and sensitively. Binoche has never been more radiant; Isabelle feels everything all the time, her eyes often sparkling with the beginning of tears at the slightest provocation. We sense that love has never been something she’s been able to take lightly, least of all now, at the crisis point she perceives herself to be in. Her most out-there tryst, with a working-class man she brings back to Paris with her like some artisanal quilt, starts in that bar in the country, to the rapturous strains of Etta James’s “At Last.” Sylvain (Paul Blain) approaches Isabelle for a dance, and in that moment, wordless and sensual, the fact that they have nothing in common, that he barely even speaks the same language as her, ceases to matter.

Other films have addressed this kind of dynamic with crasser, more literal results; Denis treats it all with a kind of serenity, hardly able to imagine an “end” to Isabelle’s struggles, because what would that possibly look like? The film itself seems reluctant to tie itself off, giving us one of the great end-credits-as-scene sequences of the last year ( Call Me by Your Name and Good Time being other memorable examples). In the final minutes, Gerard Depardieu lumbers into the picture, walking out of what appears to be a kind of romantic disappointment Isabelle would be sympathetic to. He’s a love psychic, and Isabelle has come to him for guidance about her various affairs. He offers her advice, which feels as circuitous and lacking in finality as the film, the only repeated dictate being to remain “open.” (Spoken in English, no less.) As we’ve seen over the last 90 minutes, that can be a lot to ask, but as Isabelle smiles, eyes sparkling, internalizing that command, she knows, and we know, that it’s the only possible way forward.

• movie review
• juliette binoche
• claire denis

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Movie Review: Let the Sunshine In (2017)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> July 11, 2018

“You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from” — Werner Erhard

Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, “ Ghost in the Shell ”), a divorced fiftyish artist, is attractive, urbane, and highly intelligent but her relationships seem to have a built-in mechanism for self destruction. The men in Isabelle’s life offer her little except temporary physical pleasure and are pretty much ciphers (and not very nice ones at that). Loosely based on Roland Barthes’ book “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” with a screenplay by Christine Angot, Claire Denis’ (“Bastards”) sophisticated comedy/drama Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) is lighter fare than normal for Denis, but it has its probing, self-reflective moments as well and Juliet Binoche, as usual, is an appealing screen presence.

Isabelle wants to find someone who fits her pictures but, as most of us discover sooner or later, life often does not fit our pictures. All of her relationships start out to be very promising, but eventually the decisions she makes about her partners seem to get in the way of her satisfaction. Whatever she thinks that she is looking for, she does not find it with either banker Vincent (Xavier Beauvois, “ Farewell, My Queen ”), actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle, “Wedding Unplanned”), ex-husband François (Laurent Grévill, “A Perfect Man”), or any other potential beau for that matter. The film begins with Isabelle in bed with the married, pretentious Vincent. Things are looking a-okay until she decides that he is taking too long to climax, a fact she decides reflects badly on her.

Vincent asks her whether she has had more success with other lovers, but her response is a convincing slap in the face. She is with him when he bullies a bartender, but she does not react. The next time he visits her in her apartment, however, she calls him an unrepeatable name, then tells him to leave and not come back. Instead, she hooks up with a young actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle, “The Well-Digger’s Daughter”) who is also married, (though with a better disposition). When she invites him in for a drink, they play endless games about whether he should stay or leave. When he decides to stay, they go through the motions together, but by the next morning he concludes that things were better before they had sex and wishes that it had not happened.

The next one up is François (Grévill), who is concerned about their ten-year-old daughter after she tells him that her mother cries every night. This is not good news for Isabelle to hear and she uses it as a reason to end any chance for reconciliation. There are several more suitors that follow, but Isabelle always finds something about them that she dislikes. She meets Sylvain (Paul Blain, “All is Forgiven”) at a club and he literally sweeps her away with pleasure as they dance to Etta James’ beautiful “At Last.” Unfortunately, Fabrice (Bruno Podalydès, “Chocolat”), an art gallery owner, convinces her that Sylvain is wrong for her because he is not a good fit for her circle. This provides cover for her to end yet another relationship, one that had barely even begun.

There is not much left for her of course but to go to a clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, “ My Afternoons with Margueritte ”), but his banter provides little certainty that she will find “the one.” There are times in Let the Sunshine In when Isabelle has moments of happiness and optimism, but she can also come across as needy and, at times, almost desperate. Nonetheless, through the magic of Binoche’s performance, she is a sympathetic figure and one that we root for. Her quest, however, has a touch of game playing to it and it seems that, for Isabelle, it may not be whether you win or lose but how you play the game.

Tagged: dating , divorce , love , novel adaptation , relationship , sex

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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‘let the sunshine in’ (‘un beau soleil interieur’): film review | cannes 2017.

French auteur Claire Denis ('Beau Travail,' 'I Can’t Sleep') premiered her latest film 'Let the Sunshine In' as an opening-night selection in the Cannes Directors' Fortnight sidebar.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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Like a Judd Apatow thriller or a Michael Haneke kids flick, the concept of a Claire Denis comedy at first sounds like a contradiction in terms. After all, the 71-year-old French auteur , whose film Beau Travail remains one of the great works of the last few decades, has taken an especially grim turn as of late, with movies like Bastards , White Material and The Intruder exploring some of the darker sides of contemporary humanity.

So it comes as quite a surprise that Let the Sunshine In ( Un beau soleil interieur ), which stars a moody and moving Juliette Binoche as a 50-something artist and divorced mother who has an extremely hard time getting – let alone knowing – what she wants, can be funny, rather light on its feet, yet incredibly perceptive about the very complicated lives and relationships we lead, especially when they involve members of the opposite sex.

Co-written with novelist Christine Angot (Incest ), whose voice can be heard in the series of casually cruel, at times desperately hilarious conversations that Binoche’s character engages in with a merry-go-round of likely and unlikely suitors, this is clearly Denis’ chattiest effort yet, marking an about-face for a director whose oeuvre has defined itself, in part, through its swooning visuals and deft aesthetic touch.

Here, it’s as if she were venturing into Noah Baumbach or Hong Sang-soo territory, with a movie that relies almost solely on dialogue and performance to get its point across. In that sense, Sunshine may initially seem off-putting to fans looking for more of the same, but the film slowly but surely works its charms, painting a rich, emotionally complex portrait of a woman who, like Denis herself, will not let herself be boxed in.

The first time we see Isabelle ( Binoche ), she’s having sex with a banker (fellow auteur Xavier Beauvois ) in what is probably the most explicit scene in the film. But what could be a moment of intimate bliss soon turns sour when neither Isabelle nor her lover appear to be getting what they need out of the encounter. This comedy of amorous errors will be more or less repeated throughout: Each time we think, or hope, that Isabelle is finally connecting with her significant other, things fall apart.

Sometimes it’s her fault and sometimes it’s theirs. Either way, in almost every scene Denis and Angot channel the utter incompatibility of Isabelle’s needs with those of the men she’s involved with — the banker, an actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle ), her ex (Laurent Grevill ), a fellow artist (Bruno Podalydes ), to name a few — in an endless game of quid pro quos that stretches all the way to the end of the closing credits (in a scene featuring Gerard Depardieu at his devious best).

In what may be the film’s most bravura sequence, Isabelle meets the young and swarthy actor after a performance, after which she manages to painstakingly cajole him back to her place. But as soon as she busts out the champagne, he tries to leave, until he decides to stay again, and then for the whole night, only to blow her off the next morning. He’s as uncertain as she is, longing to go back to “the before” when they didn’t have sex — like most men Isabelle meets, the actor is already with somebody else — forever in pursuit of something that will be impossible to obtain.

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Such material is ripe for comedy, and Denis reveals a real knack for staging sequences that grow increasingly absurd — often in a dark and depressive way — with each passing bon mot. The more we get to know Isabelle, the more mysterious and even exasperating she becomes (especially when she dumps one guy purely because someone told her to), yet that doesn’t mean she hasn’t won us over by the end.

Very much like Isabelle Huppert in Mia Hansen-Love’s Things to Come , Binoche blissfully portrays a woman “of a certain age” trying to find happiness at a time when it feels like a rare commodity. Most men she’s surrounded by don’t want to commit, yet Isabelle isn’t necessarily willing to commit either, and Binoche expertly channels the constant uncertainty her character faces. You can read it in her tired eyes, in the weary way she regards some of her lovers — but also in the way she can suddenly glow, like in a memorable scene where Isabelle dances with a complete stranger (Paul Blain) to Etta James’ “At Last.”

Confined mostly to dialogue sequences, Sunshine lacks the visual oomph of Denis’ best films and feels closest to 2002’s Vendredi soir , another more character-based effort. Regular DP Agnes Godard nonetheless captures some of the gray sadness of the Paris settings, while a jazzy score by the Tindersticks ‘ Stuart A. Staples adds to the gloomy tone. For admirers of Denis, it’s probably not a shock that she hasn’t made the cheeriest comedy in history. What’s surprising is how much her jokes can touch us.

Production companies: Curiosa Films, FD Production, Ad Vitam, Versus Production Cast: Juliette Binoche , Xavier Beauvois , Gerard Depardieu , Philippe Katerine , Josiane Balasko , Sandrine Dumas, Nicolas Duvauchelle , Alex Descas Director: Claire Denis Screenwriters: Claire Denis, Christine Angot Producer: Olivier Delbosc Director of photography: Agnes Godard Production designer: Arnaud de Moleron Costume designer: Judy Shrewsbury Editor: Guy Lecorne Composer: Stuart A. Staples Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight) Sales: Films Distribution

In French 94 minutes

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Review: Turning the World On, the LSD Way, in ‘The Sunshine Makers’

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By Manohla Dargis

• Jan. 19, 2017

The title of the documentary “The Sunshine Makers” — about two trippy American renegades who produced millions of hits of LSD and helped turn on the United States of Acid — sounds like one of those old citrus labels that growers used to slap on wooden crates. With names like Morning Glory, these crates promised a ray of sun in each juicy bite. In 1970, Florida anointed itself the Sunshine State , but this documentary suggests that way out West, where much of this acid was produced, was where the sun shone the brightest.

For Nick Sand and Tim Scully, lysergic acid diethylamide was where it, really everything, was at. Both were in their 20s when they first experimented with psychedelics, an experience they say in the movie indelibly changed each for good and, some might say, bad. A California native, Mr. Scully had been studying at Berkeley before coming under the influence of Owsley Stanley , an intimate of the Grateful Dead and fervent advocate for acid. The more voluble Mr. Sand, a Brooklynite, entered the scene through Millbrook — the estate in upstate New York where Timothy Leary and friends partied for years — eventually going west. (In the early 1960s, Leary helped oversee the Harvard Psilocybin Project , researching LSD.)

Whether together or apart, Mr. Sand and Mr. Scully seemed to be operating on a similar wavelength, and the movie gets a lot of mileage from their sometimes excellent, at times hair-raising, occasionally puckishly funny and altogether wild adventures. At least according to “The Sunshine Makers,” theirs is the story of two young men who found and (arguably) lost their way in the ’60s, a tale that has resonance for the bigger sociopolitical picture. Both Mr. Scully and Mr. Sand saw themselves as missionaries of a type, spreading transcendence one hit at a time. Mr. Sand says that during one early enlightened moment, a voice told him, “Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world.” He obeyed that voice unconditionally.

The director, Cosmo Feilding Mellen, fluidly knits together a lot of information, people and places, sights and sounds, including some faded, pretty far-out archival footage of Mr. Sand and Mr. Scully making acid in labs back in the day. (The editor Nick Packer deserves credit as well.) As Mr. Mellen plaits together these individual histories, he incessantly toggles between past and present. Some of the flashbacks to the ’60s are as familiar as hippie chicks and the corner of Haight and Ashbury, but Mr. Sand and Mr. Scully are true individuals, with delightful quirks and weird tales that keep the material from genericism. (There are several scenes of Mr. Sand practicing yoga in the nude, a lifelong habit that he’s continued into his 70s.)

“The Sunshine Makers” isn’t exactly an advocacy movie, but Mr. Mellen’s sympathies are transparently with his subjects, even if he does check in (humorously and a touch condescendingly) with some of the cops who once chased down Mr. Sand and Mr. Scully. At times, it all seems a bit too, well, sunny, especially given what happened after Mr. Sand and Mr. Scully’s production increased and their stacks of cash grew. (Another documentary, “ Orange Sunshine ,” focuses on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which distributed their acid.) Still, even if you never shake the feeling that there’s more to this story, more darkness and scares, there’s no question that hanging out with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on acid has its appeal.

The Sunshine Makers Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

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Let the Sunshine In

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All images are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders and/or producers/distributors.

• Laurent Grévill
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• "Ms. Binoche is the film's primary and sufficient source of light. The radiance is all hers. The clouds, too."  A. O. Scott : The New York Times
• "A simple story of enormous complexity (...) A peculiarly insightful glimpse into the emotional fluidity within the formal boundaries of French culture."  Richard Brody : The New Yorker
• "If 'Bright Sunshine In' doesn’t know where to look for the light, it certainly has a good bit of fun scrambling about in the darkness."  David Ehrlich : IndieWire
• "It's Binoche, here delivering one of her finest and most subtly calibrated performances, who imbues Isabelle with the heart (...) that makes her far more appealing (...) than the pathetic figure she might have been (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"  Ann Hornaday : The Washington Post
• "[It] can be funny, rather light on its feet, yet incredibly perceptive about the very complicated lives and relationships we lead, especially when they involve members of the opposite sex."  Jordan Mintzer : The Hollywood Reporter
• "An unprecedented misfire from Claire Denis (...) Hopefully with her next effort, Denis takes her time, and focuses more on the image than the words."  Bradley Warren : The Playlist
• "Claire Denis's delightful foray into romantic kinda-comedy retains all the director's signature sensual delicacy."  Guy Lodge : Variety
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'Eric': Is the Netflix crime drama based on a true story? And will there be a Season 2?

Spoiler alert! The following story contains major plot details about the series finale of "Eric" (now streaming on Netflix).

Benedict Cumberbatch is a monster of a man.

In Netflix drama “Eric,” the two-time Oscar nominee plays Vincent Anderson, a vicious alcoholic who helps run “Good Day Sunshine,” a “ Sesame Street ”-style children’s TV show in 1980s New York. At home, Vincent is a terror to his wife, Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann), and 9-year-old son, Edgar (Ivan Howe), who goes missing one day on his way to school. Vincent spirals and embarks on a drug-addled search that takes him to New York's underbelly, accompanied by a giant puppet named Eric, who appears as a hallucination.

Although Edgar’s disappearance was thought to be a kidnapping, we eventually learn that he ran away. And in the series’ sixth and final episode, Vincent wears an Eric costume and makes a televised plea for his son to come home, leading to a teary reunion.

But it’s a decidedly unhappy ending for Michael (McKinley Belcher III), a Black gay cop who is forced to keep his sexuality secret as AIDS panic sweeps the city. Meanwhile, his search for a missing Black teen named Marlon Rochelle ends in heartbreak.

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“It’s a parallel journey of (Vincent and Michael) trying to find themselves,” says creator Abi Morgan (“The Iron Lady”), who broke down the series finale for USA TODAY.

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Is 'Eric' based on a true story?

Although true-crime series continue to be wildly popular on Netflix, “Eric” isn’t one of them. “It wasn’t based on any one story,” Morgan says. “I think if I’d wanted to do that, I would have really gone deep into that story.” Rather, it’s loosely based on several cases she had heard about growing up in the U.K. “There were several children who disappeared. I wanted to create a kind of everychild; the simple act of going out one day and not coming home felt very resonant.”

How does the show end for Benedict Cumberbatch's character?

The series ends with Vincent on the set of “Good Day Sunshine.” Edgar walks in wearing Eric’s costume and introduces himself as the monster. “Pleased to meet you,” Vincent says. “Have we not met before?” The camera pans up to the "real" Eric, watching father and son from afar before the end credits roll.

“I wanted to get back to the idea of the boy reclaiming the monster; I always had this very strong image of the boy crawling back inside,” Morgan says of the final scene. “At its most simple metaphor, it’s about the inner child: Vincent goes on this quest to find his son, and inadvertently, you realize it's a quest to find himself.” Ultimately, “it’s about this boy understanding his father in a way that Vincent doesn't even understand himself. In going on this journey, he sees that Edgar has laid out this incredible lesson for him, which is to be careful not to neglect your children because they listen and observe.”

What is the song in the series finale?

The series ends with “I’m Not in Love,” a bittersweet 1975 ballad by British group 10cc. It’s a callback to the first episode, when Edgar listens to the song as he walks to school the day he goes missing. “There’s a haunting romanticism,” Morgan says. “We hear it as Edgar disappears, but in his returning, it’s played in a much gentler way so that we can just enjoy it as a track. We lean into the reassuring resolution of the father and son coming back together at the end.”

What happens to Marlon Rochelle and his mom?

Through security-camera footage, Michael discovers that Marlon was molested by a closeted politician and murdered by racist police detectives behind a nightclub. His body was taken by garbagemen to a landfill, and in a devastating scene, we watch as his mother, Cecile (Adepero Oduye), searches through the refuse for her son. “My son deserved to live in a city that protected him,” Cecile says at a press conference after the case is closed. “For all of our sons, please do better.”

Writing Marlon’s story, Morgan was inspired by Stephen Lawrence, a Black British teen who was murdered in 1993, as well as the more recent killing of George Floyd by police. She wanted to show the audience that when it comes to justice, there is no "neat resolution."

Not only is Cecile a mom who’s lost her child, but she also represents “a mother for a lost generation,” Morgan says. “That symbolic line she has at the end is a nod to Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons,’ which is about taking responsibility. Cecile is calling for collective responsibility of how we raise and support our sons, be that through the body of a family, our police force or our government.”

Will there be an 'Eric' Season 2?

"Eric" is a miniseries that gives closure to most of its major characters. But if the show proves a hit, could a second season explore a different missing person case or pocket of New York? Morgan finds that potential “interesting,” but says it was never her intent.

“The joy of a limited series is that it hopefully burns bright for that period, so I never saw it beyond that,” Morgan says. “I feel those characters have exorcised their demons and come to a resolution, and as an exploration of the city at that time, we’ve probably grappled with everything there. It feels like it landed for me in six episodes, so I don’t know I would take it any further than that.”

Looking for reliable options to stream 'Eric' on Netflix? Check out USA TODAY Home Internet for  broadband service plans  in your area.

The ultimate film about Los Angeles, plus the week’s best movies

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Hello! I’m not Mark Olsen but Joshua Rothkopf, stepping in for an abbreviated taste of the best movies coming to your favorite L.A. repertory theaters this week. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

‘Big Trouble in Little China’

John Carpenter’s career will always be a subject of fascination for me, particularly his habit during the 1980s of taking big swings once he had gained — or, more accurately, regained — enough clout. After 1984’s “Starman” netted Jeff Bridges an acting Oscar nomination (rare for sci-fi), the director mounted a huge-hearted fantasy, inflected by his love of John Wayne westerns and martial arts movies. Fine, so it wasn’t the next “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “Big Trouble in Little China” represents one of the decade’s more exhilarating dares. Plus, you can speculate on the alternate history of Kim Cattrall, Action Hero. It screens on Saturday at midnight at the New Beverly in 35mm (of course), and while online tickets have sold out, there will be some added availability on the night.

The ultimate movie about L.A.

I recently moved from an apartment that was a five-minute walk (I walk!) from the Academy Museum. Already I’m having withdrawal symptoms. Sunday’s midday screening of Thom Andersen’s “Los Angeles Plays Itself” would have been a perfect excuse for a stroll. A critical examination of L.A.’s onscreen history — evolving as office towers rise, neighborhoods recede and corporate interests expand — the film is both a record of lost evidence captured in the backgrounds of movies, as well as a major piece of cultural excavation à la Mike Davis’ landmark “City of Quartz.” Andersen’s documentary is trove of movie nods, everything from “The Exiles” to “Swordfish.” An April conversation at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies between musician Kim Gordon and author Rachel Kushner used the film as a critical point of reference. You can’t call yourself a real Angeleno without seeing it — but yes, Thom, of course we refer to the city as “L.A.”

Bleak Week returns in all its dark glory

Even though American Cinematheque’s beloved series is only in its third year, it already feels an essential part of the annual screening calendar. Kicking off June 1 for a week, the 43-film showcase is already enjoying robust ticket sales, but don’t give up hope. Standby lines will form and the devoted will find a way in. Plus, you’ll be able to see several Times staffers and freelancers in action: On Wednesday, Mark Olsen introduces the punishing “Ratcatcher” and speaks with director Lynne Ramsay; Katie Walsh chats with Ramsay on Thursday about her equally oppressive “Morvern Callar.” On Sunday, Carlos Aguilar will sit down with filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt to talk about his animated “World of Tomorrow” and a new short, “Me.” Don’t miss Tim Grierson in conversation with director Lynne Littman about “Testament,” a nightmarish film that, in no small sense, saved the world . And I’ll be there doing Q&As for “Seven” (with screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker) and the extended cut of “Margaret” with director Kenneth Lonergan and actor J. Smith-Cameron.

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Joshua Rothkopf is film editor of the Los Angeles Times. He most recently served as senior movies editor at Entertainment Weekly. Before then, Rothkopf spent 16 years at Time Out New York, where he was film editor and senior film critic. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Sight and Sound, Empire, Rolling Stone and In These Times, where he was chief film critic from 1999 to 2003.

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