Let The Sunshine In (Denis, 2017)

It's strange looking back at reviews around the time this came out, at the people comparing this so much to Rohmer (I did as well), yet this rewatch weirdly reveals a different pocket Denis is playing in. The heavier approach dialogue here, as well as the more wistful romantic narrative does certainly bring to mind the best work of Rohmer but Denis and Godard here don't really engage with much of that beyond the cursory. Their approach to mise-en-scene and camera movement struck me as being much closer to the work of Rivette (especially in his 90s work). A kind of airy quality where the camera gracefully glides around rooms and across people with seeming effortlessness. It's probably her first film since her debut that feels so indebted to him. 

It's telling that for how humorous this film struck/strikes people, it's apparent scathing-ness generally gets less attention. The "fuckboi" mentality is strong in its male characters. Their words, scabrous, but tossed off so carelessly as if they say nothing out of the ordinary. They can be direct or beat around the bush, but they all walk around with seeming carelessness to the people around them, or they feign concern. It's relatively modern in that sense, not that men haven't been sleeping around and using women for centuries, but more in their attitude and demeanor to doing so. 

For the majority of her career as a director, Denis has been pretty consistent in her films showcasing the lives of those in the working class, the under-class, the underground in some instances. It was in White Material that her eye did begin to drift in this regard, perhaps due to budgetary concerns and requiring(?) a lead with a name, Isabelle Huppert, that presenting the upper class in her films. Certainly not without critiquing them of course, but for whatever reason the upper class began to have more interest to her. 

But it's this film that, I think, fully revels in it's upper-class/upper-middle class luxuries. She isn't able to cut around to various revolutionary factions as in the aforementioned White Material or present the film through the eyes of a vengeful mariner as in Bastards. Here, we are only privy to Isabelle's (Juliette Binoche) perspective. We barely see Isabelle at work, painting, but she lives in a nice apartment, attends and/or presents at galleries, wears nice clothes, et. - monetary problems do not appear to even enter into her periphery. To even go outside of her circle of friends (class) is too much for her. In this regard, it's a gentler, more subtle critique at class than the previous two films have done. The violence is purely emotional. A desire to have and be rid of each other, personalities are rendered insufficient, they only need the body of another. 

To this, perhaps Denis' least alienating film - though what do I know, when I saw it in a theater and people started leaving during the credits people thought Binoche's performance was too "wishy-washy" for them - but also maybe her most accessible. It plays within romantic/romantic-comedy conventions, and the sort of narrative beats one generically associates with French cinema and it doesn't to much to undermine them so much as it underlines and highlights certain beats that many might otherwise overlook. It isn't so much an aberration in her filmography as some critics have asserted as much as a detour, a dalliance, into generic territory she had yet to engage with. For me, it's not a truffle, it's a souffle.

Bastards (Denis, 2013)

Denis' noir-riffing thriller remains her bleakest work (from everything I've seen). A bloody and jagged knife that's started to rust. Vincent Lindon is Robert Mitchum, a humble man who gets called back to enact revenge upon those who have destroyed his family. There is no hope and no salvation, only brutality. 

Viewing this in the context of knowing it as Denis' first feature using mainly digital does provide insight into its presentation. It is perhaps Denis' most (intentionally?) ugly film. The digital photography is muddy and dark, though never not precise. It's a grey world and sapped of color and vibrancy. Every shot purposeful and feeling intentional but also thrown off, though this could be said of a majority of her post-2000's work. But it's through this digital lens that she's working with here that makes the whole endeavor come across as a more "gritty", for lack of a better word, genre exploration than some of the earlier ones were. 

The anger of the upper class here is seething in its fury. No one is provided safety from those with the cash, you will be used to satisfy or at least satiate their hunger and then left for dead. It is a world bathed in shadows. And knowing what happens within said shadows is maybe better off not being revealed to us - depravity awaits. 

There's a degree to which it is a male power fantasy to be "the one who comes in and saves the day", as it were. Being called into a dangerous/shady situation and solving it for the family/community around said male. As mentioned above, it plays into noir/thriller archetypes. What is a man to do when his idea of being the hero to whomever cannot be actualized. Denis undermines the entire male bravado here by placing it in perspective of a world dominated wealth. Wealth equals power, and power means righteousness (even righteous revenge) is futile. Settling a score or even getting even is destined to end in more tragedy. Heroes don't save the world here, they don't even live to see the sunrise. They disappear into the darkness never to reemerge from its depths.

White Material (Denis, 2009)

I think it's interesting that for the last film she shot completely on film, Denis returns to Africa (non-specific country), where she spent her youth and where her career as a filmmaker/director began in full. Decades after the look at colonial Cameroon in Chocolat, we see what has become of the continent after the white man's influence has begun to slip, per se. A legacy filled with the torture, rape, and destruction of an entire people(s) and their homeland. When the revolution starts, your money can only save you for so long. 

The way Denis has always treated class and race has always been even-handed and even-keeled. Her protagonists are those who strive for betterment, and often monetary means are required to escape whatever strife they happen to have found themselves within. Here, perhaps the first time in her filmography, she presents a protagonist who's troubles cannot be solved in this way. Due to said protagonist being Isabelle Huppert, a very white woman, and one for whom could be assumed at the top of the hierarchical chain of command, we must view this change in class perspective in context of her entire body of work. 

This is most definitely a piece where the bourgeois are under siege. The pillaging of a land and enslavement of its people for generations has come back to haunt the legacy children of these captors. But what does it mean to frame this narrative through the eyes, mainly, of an upper-class white family? Jon makes a good point in his review by saying this is ultimately a piece that will mostly play to the type of people it's criticizing (and I do think that Denis' sympathies are more in tune with the African revolutionaries than the plantation owners here) and so it's worth pondering what the ultimate goal is in presenting it through this perspective. Clearly having a presence of a star like Huppert will draw in more eyes than otherwise, though this had never seemed to be much of a priority of Denis' up to this point (though what do I know about the "stars" of France). But what good does showing the film through their eyes ultimately do. 

I think, perhaps, that it's less trying to gain sympathy from its audience and perhaps forcing us to grapple with the legacy of colonization as a whole. The older generation (Huppert and Lambert, and to a certain extent Subor) appear to exhibit less entitlement over the land and its people than the younger generation (Duvauchelle) does. This older group is more in touch, in a sense, with their foreign-ness in this land, while the younger, presumably having grown up in this country and with the amount of wealth always present, views themselves as the better. I think it's telling that after being threatened by child soldiers, Duvauchelle's character returns to his family's plantation and shaves his head, leaving home with a shotgun. His tattoos reveal some seeming awareness of "black culture" and there is some form of adopting/appropriation. His boredom that his entitlement has fostered ultimately leading him towards awareness at the hands of children. 

It's not an act of pacification on the elders of this class, but attempting to confront them with the results of their imperial drive. They may see their racism as relatively banal or even inert, but it does still exist. Not presenting for all to see the disdain or annoyance one has for those of a different race, or class, is obvious in the interactions throughout. A clear level of entitlement is present in all of Huppert's interactions with the coffee-pickers and revolutionaries. Though perhaps this is all just a horror story to those who watch this film. A view into a world they would prefer never to have to acknowledge.