‘Both Sides Of The Blade’: Berlin Review

Dir. Claire Denis. France. 2021. 116 mins.  

Claire Denis is such an unpredictable film-maker that it takes a lot to startle her following – such as the very occasional example of her drifting close to the mainstream. After her highly experimental science-fiction drama High Life (2018), her latest film seems to venture straight to the heart of French cinema’s holy of holies, the bourgeois marital drama. But, as ever, it’s the elusive way she handles it that makes Both Sides Of The Blade a quintessentially Denisian film. Stars Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon – the latter riding high after his strikingly counter-intuitive role in Julia Ducournau’s Titane – will ensure wide exposure and a healthy degree of commercial appeal following the film’s Berlin competition premiere, while Denis adepts will enthusiastically to stroke chins over it for some time to come. 

A level of alertness and nuance that pays off in a fully Bergmanesque emotional showdown

Blade…begins beautifully with the sun casting shimmering patterns in sea water, as a middle-aged couple tenderly sport in the shallows. It’s an almost generic vision of romantic bliss, especially with Denis’s usual musical collaborators, the UK group Tindersticks, bathing the scene in balmy shimmers of sound. But beware: the film’s title Avec amour et acharnement means ‘With Love And Fury’ (the mysterious English title comes from Tindersticks’ closing song) and the film is a collaboration with novelist Christine Angot, a specialist in the dark side of intimacy. French literature’s high priestess of ‘autofiction’, notorious for mining her own turbulent life in her books, Angot – whose An Impossible Love was recently adapted by Catherine Corsini – previously worked with Denis on 2017’s deconstructed romcom Let The Sunshine In, a much lighter vehicle for Binoche. This film, based on a 2018 Angot novel, is much more satisfying – and considerably more troubling.

Set in Paris and its outskirts, the film – originally announced as Fire - is about a middle-aged couple, Sara (Binoche) and Jean (Lindon), who have lived together for nine years and who, opening sequences establish, are still passionately in love. She’s a radio host, he’s a former rugby professional who has spent time in prison; he’s also the father of a mixed-race teenager, Marcus (Issa Perica, the young discovery of Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables), who lives in the suburb of Ivry with his grandmother Nelly (Bulle Ogier). But Jean’s and Sara’s fates are linked by her ex, François (Denis regular Grégoire Colin), who still has a place in her heart and libido: she only has to glimpse him and she’s triggered into flurries of trembling panic, and soon more. Meanwhile, François is starting a company for the recruitment of young sports talent, and wants old sidekick Jean to work with him. Much of the ensuing dramatic irony comes from Jean’s willingness to let François back into his life, and into Sara’s. 

The big problem with this hyper-charged triangle lies at one corner: François remains somewhat nebulous throughout, possibly because Colin isn’t nearly as impactful a presence as his co-stars, possibly because Denis and Angot simply don’t give him nearly as much to work with. François comes across as a shady lurker in the background, who – when he fully emerges – does so as a smirking predator, sure of his power over Sara.

And what power. Some viewers may find it hard to credit the emotional extremes on display here, which seem more to do with the codes of French psychological drama than with the way people might actually behave in real relationships. Indeed, Binoche has not always convinced in conventional terms when playing women in a psychosexual fluster. Nevertheless, it’s something that she specialises in, and she pushes that register a lot further here – and far more compellingly - than in Denis’s Sunshine. Her duets with Lindon show the two actors working at the top of their game, on a level of alertness and nuance that pays off in a fully Bergmanesque emotional showdown. 

But there’s a lot more going on beyond this: not least, Jean’s relationship with the son whose needs and troubles are pushing his grandmother to the limit of her resources (young Perica and revered French veteran Ogier have a lovely, prickly rapport). That the film appears at first sight to be the classic white middle-class drama is offset by a scene in which Jean gives Marcus a pep talk addressing some very contemporary themes of identity politics, and by Sara’s radio show, which hosts real-life commentators Hind Darwish and Lilian Thuram, talking respectively about the state of Lebanon and the problem of ‘white thinking’. 

Denis appears primarily to be working with generic base material, the familiar stuff of educated urban angst: it’s no surprise when at one point, Sara sighs, “Here we go again, - love, fear, sleepless nights…” Yet the stylistic execution brings a surprising set of dynamics: rapid cutting, restless camerawork (by globetrotting star DoP Eric Gautier, in his first collaboration with Denis) and the repeated use of tight close-ups, sometimes so full-on that the actors are really in our face and we’re in theirs. The Tindersticks music musters a tone of unease, applying nervous strings even to the most innocuous-seeming domestic moments, while the dramatic leitmotif of warily snatched phone calls, often glimpsed through windows, reinforces the cagy, conspiratorial dance that the characters weave around each other. Incidentally, long-term Denis watchers will spot brief appearances by faces from her earlier films: Alice Houri, and Richard Courcet. along with actor-director Mati Diop (35 Shots of Rum) as a sympathetic local pharmacist.