I’m all like, hey, I know where to go for classic cinemas, but where should I go to get recommendations for new movies that aren’t just obvious “hmm, have you tried this ‘avengers’ thing”, right. And then I find out that the S&S people do an annual poll of like hundreds of global critics using the same methodology as for their all-time poll, but limiting it to movies of the past year.

And since it’s global, it can get kind of weird re release dates. There are some movies on this list that haven’t yet been released in the US, some that were out years ago (and also appeared on previous years of the poll), but they basically dgaf and let it ride.

And so the top movie on this list is Roma, which I’ve been staring at on Netflix but Jess wants to watch with me; the second is Phantom Thread, which is on HBOGO but she also wants to watch (although she gave me permission to watch it on my own, so don’t think she’s like blocking me from watching things). And so anyway, I kinda scrolled through the list looking for things that were a) on streaming services, and b) not super-grimdark and/or by Paul “screenwriter of Taxi Driver” Schrader, and I came on Let the Sunshine In by Claire Denis.

You of course will remember Claire Denis from Beau Travail, one of the more recent movies on the S&S Great Movies list. But so this is a movie about relationships starring Juliette Binoche and Gérard Depardieu.

(Spoilers follow, on the off chance you care.)

Binoche is a divorcee who is having an affair with this banker who is a total like-wow asshole; she breaks it off, and then moves on to have a relationship with another guy who is a total asshole; and then she hooks up with her ex because she’s got a ticket for the Bad Life Choices express train, apparently. This is followed by her hooking up with another dude who’s not really right for her, and then a dude who idk maybe he’s not terrible but also he doesn’t seem super-interested?

But let’s be clear that through all these relationships, it’s not just the men who are bad. She is herself also being super-awful, doing that “GO AWAY, JUST LEAVE… wait, don’t go, i need you” thing and otherwise just being completely and totally unclear about what she wants out of anything. And also she keeps talking to various male acquaintances who tell her that her relationships are awful (which is true) (but they are saying it in a sabotaging way because they themselves want to date her, not out of any genuine friendship or anything).

And throughout the whole movie I’m like, okay, I know I’m kind of face-blind, but Gérard Depardieu is really noticeable isn’t he? He’s like this giant fat guy with an enormous nose? Was he one of these guys that I missed? But no. Near the end, there’s a scene where Gérard Depardieu pops up and gets dumped by a random woman, and then the next scene is him being a psychic and giving Juliette Binoche relationship advice, which boils down to “nah, it’s probably not going to work out with those other guys, but you know, someone exactly like me might come along, you should be open to that.” And the whole time this conversation is ongoing, the credits are playing right over the actors, which kind of lends an unearned air of finality to Depardieu’s speech, and there’s a sense in which the movie seems to be steering toward “this is the guy she ends up with,” but at the same time it’s totally doing the “this is just another self-serving asshole who wants to get in her pants” thing, so it’s about as ambiguous as Binoche’s character herself throughout the whole movie.

So also I read some reviews to see what critics were thinking about this, and one thing they note is how unusual it is for the movie to show someone of Binoche’s age (she’s 53) as unabashedly sexual — there are R-rated sex scenes in the movie, which on the one hand you want to say that it’s courageous of Binoche to appear naked in her 50s, but on the other hand if you looked like her in your 50s, you’d probably be like “MAN SOMEONE PUT THIS ON THE PERMANENT RECORD” — so I guess that’s a thing too. It’s maybe a sign of how old I am that it never even really occurred to me that she was notably old.