Un beau soleil intérieur

Now I do like Juliet Binoche. She has a versatility to her as an actor that means she can just about turn her hand to anything. Quite why she picked this rather humdrum exercise, though, is a bit of a puzzle. She is "Isabelle", a divorced forty-something mother who's looking for something just that little bit more fulfilling from life. She's not, however, having much luck as the men she meets seem to illicit little more than commitment phobia from one or other of them. What now ensues over the next ninety minutes is a rather depressing, plodding and verbose, look at the men she encounters, sleeps with and then discards or is discarded by and for me, that rather undermined the whole point of her search. How was she ever to find that elusive sense of completion when she never seems able to stop looking? There's plenty of sex, natural looking insofar as sometimes it seems enjoyable and at others more a perfunctory conclusion to a date or a conversation, but where's the substance. What Binoche does bring here is a solid portrayal of a woman for whom the grass may always be greener, and whose attitude may just be deterring those men she wants to meet and attracting those she doesn't. That ever decreasing circle is quite well exemplified by "Vincent" (Xavier Beavois) and "Fabrice" (Bruno Podalydès) as well as by the annoyingly self-obsessed actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who rather epitomises her strengths and flaws without even giving his character a name. It's quite a disappointing look at relationships and human nature this, that retreads some familiar territory without really challenging anything or anyone, and though perfectly watchable it isn't anyone's finest work.