“All for freedom and for pleasure / Nothing ever lasts forever”: Thoughts on Un beau soleil intérieur (2017) and Superbad (2007)
This piece contains spoilers for both Un beau soleil intérieur and Superbad.
The past two movies I’ve watched this summer as of this writing have both been films I initially felt were a bit outside my comfort zone: Claire Denis’ Un beau soleil intérieur (2017) and Greg Mottola’s Superbad (2007). The perfect decade split between the two was a complete and happy accident, but noticing it got me interested in actually bringing the two into conversation somewhat when my first thought was just to write about Superbad since I had the most to say about it. I used the word “initially” before because these were both movies I went into without a certain amount of excitement. I picked Un beau soleil intérieur despite the synopsis not necessarily grabbing me because I wanted to see something else by Denis and it was the film that was available on Hulu. I’ve had positive experiences being pushed a bit on my taste by friends before, and I also didn’t want the only film I had seen by Denis to be High Life (2018), which is maybe a more “conventional” English-language sci-fi thriller film by the French director.
Un beau soleil intérieur—and I’m using the French title since apparently the English translation doesn’t quite convey the same meaning—is a film about love and sex and how those things become fraught for women as they age. The main character is a divorced, middle-aged artist named Isabelle, and the movie is about her various relationships with men. It’s a close look at the specific things those men do or don’t do for her romantically and sexually and about the process of navigating these things as an aging woman. It feels like a particularly poignant film because so much of our media is about romance and sex but focused exclusively on teenagers or sort of ambiguously-aged “adults” who are still on the young side. The most poignant scene in the film, which feels like the centerpiece around which the rest of the movie is arrayed, is the moment when Isabelle (played by Juliette Binoche) breaks down a bit in a bathroom as she talks with her friend Ariane (Sandrine Dumas). Isabelle is worried that her romantic life is over, and in that moment she hits upon the fear of how age can make people settle for the familiar even if it isn’t really fulfilling or the best thing for them. Ultimately, however, she doesn’t get back together with her ex-husband, though the two have a fling at one point. The film actually ends without resolving things to an extent. Nothing seems to come of the conflict between Isabelle and her ex-husband François (Laurent Grévill) regarding their daughter’s exposure to Isabelle’s tempestuous feelings, and Isabelle’s story “ends” with her visiting a psychic who encourages her to continue looking for love as she has been, though perhaps with a certain newfound peace of spirit.
I ultimately enjoyed Un beau soleil intérieur. It’s a small-scale film, but it gives the nuances of the actors’ performances a lot of room to shine (in contrast to a thrill-a-minute blockbuster). It’s ultimately something of a character study, like other films I’ve enjoyed and written about on here. Also like some of those other films, it defies audience expectations. As I already noted, it leaves certain threads, including its protagonist’s quest for love, unresolved in a way that might not be expected. An early plot thread about Isabelle’s ex-husband possibly having cheated on her with a new business associate of Isabelle’s also proves to be nothing. On that note, another way that Denis’ movie seems to defy expectations is in its treatment of infidelity in general. Two of the men that Isabelle has relationships with are currently married, but Un beau soleil intérieur doesn’t devolve into a drama focused on that infidelity. The choice to be unfaithful definitely characterizes the men and certainly contributes to the way that they treat Isabelle, of course. The brash, crude banker Vincent (played by Xavier Beauvois) views her as a sexual conquest first and foremost and ultimately ruins his relationship with her when he comes back from a trip abroad talking about how, essentially, he just got back in town and decided to “bang” her. On the other hand, the actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) can’t decide if he’s leaving his wife for Isabelle or not, and that uncertainty that leads to the ongoing infidelity is just further evidence of one of his faults that Isabelle points out to him at one point after a date. She feels that they didn’t really say anything to one another the whole evening—that they said one thing and then the opposite of that. Thus, he wavers in both conversation and his romantic commitments. It’s a problem not exclusively confined to his cheating. The infidelity matters to the story, but it doesn’t factor into it in the way that viewers might expect. My feeling is that Un beau soleil intérieur is more interested in the question of whether these men are ultimately right for Isabelle (and/or in the ways they are wrong for Isabelle) than in their unfaithfulness to their current partners specifically. It’s not that the infidelity means nothing—just that I think it’s easy to imagine some version of this story where the infidelity matters a lot more in much more conventional ways than it does here.
Despite my initial feelings, I still guessed that Denis’ movie would probably be something I would enjoy. I was a lot less certain about Superbad, which is kind of the sort of film Denis’ stands in needed contrast to—a movie about sex and romance(?) from the perspective of teenagers. I don’t tend to go for raunchy comedies like this one, and I’d never actually seen it before this year, though I certainly remembered the deluge of commercials back in the day and the prominence of the line “I am McLovin!” At first, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to make it through the whole thing thanks to the immense second-hand embarrassment. If there is one thing that Superbad absolutely nails in terms of capturing the real world, it’s the way that teenagers can and will talk extremely loudly about things they shouldn’t be talking about so loudly. Best friends Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) begin the film talking about porn over the phone. While Seth is at least in his car, Evan is in his family’s kitchen where his parents could easily hear him. It just keeps going in the same vein, though. The boys go to a convenience store before class and are in there talking too loudly about boners and about sex and women where anyone, including women, can hear them. During their home economics class, their friend/third wheel Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) barges in and starts yelling about how one of their female classmates was wearing tight white pants and a black g-string and how he could see everything! I’m not going to continue with describing these scenes, but I think this sampling proves my point. Of course, I think this is intentional. It rings true based on my experience being and, later, working with teenagers. While the subject matter isn’t always sex, there’s just a real lack of awareness there about what they’re saying and who’s hearing it.
My second-hand embarrassment continued for much of the movie, as the boys do and say various cringe-inducing things pretty much throughout. The thing is, however, that Superbad is ultimately a movie with a warm heart. The core issue here is the fact that Seth and Evan are splitting up for college. Evan got into Dartmouth (along with Fogell), while Seth is going to go to a state school. The two are doing their best early in the movie to play the situation off like it doesn’t really matter to them, but the conflict that develops between them as the story goes on is obviously a result of their unwillingness to admit how much this change affects them emotionally. When Seth accuses Evan of “ditching” him at a party where they plan to steal alcohol for a different party thrown by a girl that Seth has a crush on—and where the two boys plan to finally lose their virginity—it’s not really about that specific moment. Of course, Evan is “ditching” Seth in a much larger sense, and that conflict only resolves after Seth doesn’t ditch Evan when the latter is passed out drunk at the teenagers’ party and the cops show up to shut it down. Seth carries Evan to safety despite the social stigma of a bro carrying another bro, and the two admit that they love each other at their impromptu sleepover in Evan’s basement later that night. It’s not that these things and scenes aren’t also played for comedic effect—just that there’s an earnest heart to Superbad that it eventually reveals after you get through a good chunk of it. And perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this plot as well is how the film doesn’t take the easy way out. As I watched events unfold, I started to anticipate how things would resolve themselves, maybe even with a little “Here’s Where They Ended Up” montage at the end. As Fogell bonded with the cops, I started thinking he would choose the police academy over Dartmouth, which would kind of free Evan up to choose the state school, having realized that Friendship Matters More after he and Seth were finally able to admit their feelings about the upcoming separation. In actuality, the movie ends on a bittersweet note with its only truly poignant bit of visual storytelling.
Having gone to the mall the day after the disastrous party, Seth and Evan run into their individual love interests, Jules (Emma Stone) and Becca (Martha MacIssac), respectively, who are also there shopping in the wake of the previous night’s events. It turns out that each set of lovers has a practical excuse to pair off (Jules and Seth to look for makeup to conceal the black eye Seth accidentally gave her, Becca and Evan to look for comforters for their college dorms), and the four separate. Seth and Jules ride the escalator down to the first floor, and Seth looks back at Evan. Briefly, we see Seth’s point of view as we watch Evan disappear from sight bit by bit. Having arrived on the first floor, Seth and Jules walk away into the crowd as the camera pulls back and up to give us a view of both floors, where the boys are lost to sight in the crowd. Thematically, they still occupy the same space (the mall, specifically, and the world, more broadly), but they’ve moved on in their own separate but parallel journeys with just the promise that they have one another’s phone numbers and they can still call. It’s a sort of bittersweet ending and kind of remarkable for how it leaves so much unsaid/unresolved and showcases the separation in even a slightly symbolic rather literal way. The boys still have time to spend together before they leave for college, but the movie uses the scene at the mall to essentially forecast what that upcoming separation will be like rather than just jumping ahead and actually showing the two going off to separate colleges. It’s artistically more compelling than you might expect from Superbad, given the premise (and, admittedly, the vast majority of the rest of the movie), and it’s truer to life and sweet in a way that those cringey earlier moments in the movie didn’t really seem to even suggest might be possible.
Something else that I found legitimately surprising given the premise and much of the movie is how well some of Superbad’s messaging about drinking and sex holds up. It’s not that consent has ever not been a thing, but in the context of a raunchy comedy from 2007—a raunchy comedy that also makes an extended bit out of a girl dancing on a guy and getting menstrual blood on his leg—it really stands out how the film handles the party sequence with Seth, Evan, and their potential love interests. From nearly the start of the film when the boys decide they’re going to bring alcohol to the party, the explicit goal has been to use that (the renown and the alcohol itself) to get the girls to have sex with them. Given the state of the movie at the time this goal is established—and given the release year—anyone looking back in time to watch Superbad for the first time would be pretty justified in stopping right there. It’s a Capital-P “problematic” proposal that, thankfully (surprisingly, and to the film’s credit), doesn’t work out how it seems.
Seth and Evan finally get to the party with their alcohol (some of it in an old detergent jug), and at first things seem to be going exactly as planned. Seth is able to bask in the adulation of the partygoers and has fulfilled his promise to a grateful Jules specifically. Evan finds out Becca has been there some time and is very drunk and telling people about the sorts of things she wants to do to him. Evan questions whether it’s right for him to do anything with her in this state, and Becca’s friend tells him it’s fine if he’s drunk as well, leading to a scene where Evan drinks a bunch of alcohol in a bathroom while clearly not liking it. In the end, he turns Becca down before anything too serious can happen, though. Meanwhile, Seth manages to get Jules alone and tries to make a move, but he finds out that she A) doesn’t drink and B) won’t do anything with him while he’s drunk. There’s a huge irony here since the entire odyssey the boys have been on to get alcohol for the explicit purpose of getting laid didn’t work out, especially in Seth’s case since Jules doesn’t even drink at all. The messaging here isn’t terrible in the end, and there is also the added bonus of how Seth and Evan are both two guys who would probably fall into the so-called “beta” category for men but who are desired by their more conventionally attractive foils. Like the bittersweet ending, the messaging about attraction is also a truer to life and perhaps surprising quality of a movie called “Super bad.”
With that being said, however, I have to immediately turn around and criticize the movie since there’s still Fogell and the major cop characters left to talk about. To some extent, Fogell kind of fits with a bit of what I just said above. He’s initially in the same boat as Seth and Evan socially and sexually—He’s a sort of awkward loser whose highlight of the school day is seeing a classmate’s panties and then telling her the time when she notices him staring. He’s pressured into trying to buy the alcohol for the party with his awful fake ID and then gets tied up in the cops’ investigation of the liquor store robbery since he was punched in the face while checking out and was an immediate witness to the crime. He goes out essentially partying on duty with the cops and becomes a bolder person for it. At the teens’ party, he approaches the girl he was not-so-discretely ogling earlier in the day, who is by conventional standards “out of his league,” and introduces himself. Critically here, he uses his real name (“Fogell”) instead of the one he’s been operating under all night (“McLovin”). He starts dancing a bit weirdly, but the girl is into it. Taken on its own, this exchange works pretty well with the stuff toward the end of the previous paragraph. There seems to be a positive message here, but the way this relationship plays out is problematic since both Fogell and Nicola (Aviva Baumann) have been drinking and do start to have sex just as the cops arrive to bust the party. (Seth also ditches Fogell when he saves only Evan which resolves their conflict but still kind of makes him look like an asshole when Fogell is actually accounted for.) Nicola also seems to still think Fogell is twenty-five and from Hawaii despite him otherwise not introducing himself using the fake ID, which means she’s not really consenting to sleep with Fogell himself, even without the alcohol. It’s messy.
Perhaps even messier is the role of the two cops in the story. Officers Michaels (Seth Rogen) and Slater (Bill Hader) are initially just incompetent—if considering shooting an unarmed man in the middle of a packed restaurant can be considered just “incompetent”—but are then revealed to be outright malicious when they accidentally hit Seth while driving under the influence and messing with one another using flashlights. This apparently isn’t the first time they’ve done something like this, and their proposed solution is to frame Seth and Evan. In a way, if the movie left them in the more antagonistic role they shift into at this point, Superbad would just kind of glamorize cops being idiots and the message wouldn’t be a thoroughly terrible one. The movie is filled with examples of adults acting as stupid and irresponsibly as children, and the idea that some of those stupid and irresponsible adults are probably out there brandishing lethal weapons and fucking around while on the job wouldn’t be an awful one to convey. Even with the potential glamorization of the behavior through humor, there’s still truth in there.
The issue is that the cops circle back around in the end. They interrupt Fogell having sex when they do their jobs and break up the teen party but ultimately reveal to him in what is meant to be a somewhat touching moment that they always knew he was an under-aged kid. They just wanted to build him up a little since he reminded them of themselves at that age. They help Fogell further impress Nicola by dragging him dramatically from the house and also unknowingly do Seth and Evan (and the audience) a favor when Slater clubs the kid who took time out of his day at the beginning of the movie to spit on Seth and tell him that he and Evan were not invited to a graduation party (albeit not in that exact language). This is meant to be cathartic for the audience, of course, who remember this jerk, but, unfortunately, this is really just another example of the cops abusing their authority by attacking an unarmed brat. Even in a comedy, it is still police brutality, and that specific aspect of the movie has aged like milk on top of a radiator. Fogell later also assists the pair in lying to cover up the damage they caused to their own car before they do more reckless things to thoroughly destroy it, beginning with fast driving and donuts in an empty lot and ending with Fogell firing a service weapon repeatedly into the burning vehicle. The implication is that the cops are redeemed in a sense (within the film’s logic) by their actions at the end.
My own potentially problematic take here is that the relationship between Fogell and the cops in the broadest possible sense is not entirely awful. As previously mentioned, it’s clear that Fogell gets a lot of confidence from being with the two older men throughout the night, and the idea that they knew he was a kid but just wanted to give him some confidence isn’t (broadly speaking) terrible. He’s likely legally an adult (or close) even if he can’t drink, and the basic idea of two empathetic adults going along with the fake ID to puff the kid up a bit doesn’t strike me as inherently bad, especially in a comedy. It’s never not problematic since there’s almost certainly no way to write this relationship that doesn’t make the officers complicit in a number of crimes, the mildest of which would probably be giving someone underage alcohol, but I just don’t think the relationship in its broadest form is a terrible one. It is kind of sweet, and I really did start to suspect that the feel-good ending for Fogell would be him giving up Dartmouth to join the police academy.
One issue that’s related to the cops’ role in the plot that isn’t related to problematic messaging is the fact that I don’t completely buy that these guys are smart enough to see through the fake ID given their other behavior. If they were somewhat less incompetent, it might work, but as much of a “Oh shit!” twist as it is—and also kind of sweet in the broadest possible viewing—I don’t know that it passes muster when you compare the cops’ assertion that they’ve always known with everything else they’ve done and said that night. They also give Fogell some good-bad advice when they’re drinking at the bar in the restaurant where they responded to a disturbance earlier in the evening. Nestled amongst the whorephobia (the 2007-appropriate counterpart to the transphobia from earlier—also from the cops) is a nugget of good advice about not relying on bars to meet romantic partners. It’s not necessarily framed in a good way since it’s essentially part of the lead-up to a series of jokes about Slater accidentally marrying a sex worker, but the advice itself is kind of sound insofar as it does fall in line with some of the stuff we get later with Seth, Evan, Jules, and Becca on the subjects of drinking, sex, and love.
In short, as much as Superbad is surprising for what it is and when it was released, it’s also just as much not surprising for what it is and when it was released. I do think it could be better than it is about some of these things that I’ve criticized, albeit with significant rewrites, and it’s not like comedy requires it to be this way. The couple of times I actually, genuinely found Superbad funny, it wasn’t really being problematic (or whatever term fits). My favorite scene was definitely the one where Seth plans to steal a party’s worth of alcohol himself and has several visions about how it will play out while he contemplates the bottles in the store. The seamlessness of these fantasies, as well as the upbeat absurdity and, in one case, the unexpected gore, did get me. I thought the flashback where Seth talks about his dick-drawing obsession when he was a kid was well-executed, and I also enjoyed the bit where some dudes at the adult party who are drunk and also doing coke think Evan is a singer and seem to suggest they’ll get violent with him if he doesn’t sing a song for them. Jump forward a bit to a later scene, and the dudes are all singing along with Evan as he croons (awfully, haltingly, unclearly) for a bit. I’m not sure what I want to make of the treatment of most of the adults in the film as just larger versions of the boys in terms of interpretation—and maybe it just is the message that it seems to be: adults are just larger teenagers—but I was definitely entertained by it as a consistent element of the film’s writing and humor. Comedy is pretty subjective, of course, but I didn’t find Superbad overwhelmingly funny (mostly cringe or embarrassing), though it left a good final impression on me with some of its content underlying the comedy. A funny film also doesn’t have to be without substance, and Superbad does have some substance, even if it isn’t quite so consistent and obvious about it as something like Un beau soleil intérieur.
Ultimately, the difference in perspective between these two films, if we disregard genre for a moment, is apparent from their opening scenes: One begins with two boys talking about porn and then proceeds to theoreticals about sex and then to desperate plans to lose their virginity; the other begins with two people actually having sex and then goes on to question whether they’re right for one another. It’s sort of the teenage versus adult experience in a nutshell. I remember hearing/reading once something along the lines that stories about young people are all forward looking, while stories about adults are about looking back. I don’t think that’s precisely true—as Isabelle is certainly still looking forward, though she fears she has nothing left to look forward to—but it’s true in a broad strokes sort of way. Superbad is the fairy tale up to the “And they lived happily ever after” (in a sense), whereas Un beau soleil intérieur is the question of what comes next. Isabelle presumably lost her virginity years and years ago. She’s done the “happily ever after thing” to some extent already; she has a successful career and knows who she is. She is looking forward, but she’s also at a point in her life where she’s stable in a way that the very young usually aren’t and is looking inward to try to figure out what she really wants and back to try to figure out if maybe she can’t do better than François. Maybe it’s a bit discouraging to see that that quest for love and happiness doesn’t just magically end when you lose your virginity or find your first love, and maybe it’s encouraging because it attests to the fact that there isn’t a magical point where your love life just falls into place, that it can be a messy and uncertain process for longer and that that is ok! People still live and have sex beyond the age of eighteen (and their twenties), even if a lot of our popular media seems to suggest otherwise.
I’ve already been having more and more trouble taking seriously the sort of life-or-death romance focused on teenagers that I’ve watched or read or even written myself (once upon a time), but Un beau soleil intérieur has kind of made me feel even more of a remove from other recent films I’ve watched that have been about young love (The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020) and 6 Years (2015), to be precise). Given the amount of life these young people have left to live, the emotional weight of their romantic dilemmas, especially in 6 Years, which is much more focused on the young couple at its center, just feels unnecessary and even silly from a storytelling perspective. Of course, it is still true to life. We were all young once, and finding that first love or losing that first love means a lot, especially in the moment. As a consumer of fiction, though, it doesn’t strike me as very meaningful anymore. I tried to go back and read my second novel not that long ago, and while it was a book that meant a lot to me when I wrote it and for years afterward, I found it impossible to get into this time since so much of what I used to think were great and urgent truths about love and society don’t register as true anymore. It’s very much the perspective of a teenager/early-twenty-something. Aside from selling tickets (and books or whatever) to teenagers, there does seem to be a large adult audience for young adult stories; therefore, my final thought here is that maybe there’s something more appealing about a time when people are more consistently looking forward than when they’re aware of the world and taking stock of it and themselves—because one perspective is all about infinite dreams and endless possibilities at a time when many people feel a sense of security in the hope that the best is yet to come, whereas the other perspective is one where the finite nature of the world and of life is much more apparent. This wouldn’t be a Monty Terrible post if it didn’t come back around to the world being fucked, so here it is: The world is fucked. It’s not that teenagers aren’t aware of that ever, and I don’t want to speak in absolutes. Generally speaking, though, it seems like the more hopeful perspective. It’s not that adults can’t have hope (for love, for pleasure, for the possibility that a better or just living world is still possible—just that it has to come more heavily tempered by experience.
