‘A bright interior sun’

Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) is an artist and recent divorcée. She’s smart, independent, attractive and energetically seeking a renewal of her (by no means dormant) romantic life.

In this new film by French auteur Claire Denis (Beau Travail, Nenette & Boni, White Material, etc.), Binoche’s Isabelle finds herself pairing off with a disparate series of lovers and colleagues, most of whom run hot or cold or both, but rarely in the same ways. As such, Let the Sunshine In is a darkly glowing roundelay in which all relationships are unstable mixtures of satisfaction and disappointment.

Part of what makes all this especially engaging is a matter of the human intimacy that Denis, Binoche and a fine supporting cast bring to this offbeat parade of tangled emotions and fragmented relationships. There is no conventional romance to be found here, but the ebb and flow of romantic feelings glimmers throughout.

At the outset, Isabelle is involved in an unraveling affair with a burly banker (actor-director Xavier Beauvois). The rousing conflicts in their relations crop up in a different form later on—in her brief liaison with a fellow painter (Philippe Katerine) and yet again in the long night she spends with an actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle), immersed in lusty talk and verbal tangos of self reflection.

Denis and co-scenarist Christine Angot also devise provocative scenes for Isabelle with an art gallery executive (Alex Descas), her ex-husband (Laurent Grévill), and a psychologist/clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, seen mostly shrouded in shadow). She dances rapturously with a rough-looking stranger (Paul Blain) while Etta James’ “At Last” plays on a nightclub’s jukebox.

Josiane Balasko and Sandrine Dumas play gallerists with whom Isabelle has mixed feelings. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi has an impossible-to-miss cameo: She’s the passenger in the automobile that brings Depardieu into the story.

Finally, a word about the title: in French it is Un beau soleil intérieur, which translates roughly as “a bright interior sun.” It echoes a phrase directed toward Isabelle late in the film, and it’s closer to the heart of the matter than the English-language versions of the title in the U.S. or in Britain (where Bright Sunshine In was at least a little closer to the mark).