Both Sides of the Blade
Avec amour et acharnement
Claire Denis (2022)
A movie protagonist in the bath, up to their neck in water and angst… It’s become such a cliché that distressed bathers featured in consecutive trailers at Curzon Richmond a few weeks ago – the heroine of Don’t Worry Darling promptly followed by her counterpart in Both Sides of the Blade. BFI Player summarises Claire Denis’s latest film as follows:
‘… Radio presenter Sara (Juliette Binoche) enjoys a peaceful life with partner Jean (Vincent Lindon) who adores her, carefree holidays and a comfortable apartment in Paris [sic]. But when she catches a glimpse of her ex François (Grégoire Colin) back in town, her mask of contentment slips and she is gripped by a primal urge to be with him, triggering an eruption of hidden emotions.’
It begins with Sara and Jean on holiday, where they swim and canoodle in the sea; as in Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), bodies at play in the ocean supply the film’s most beautiful images. The idyllic seascape is quickly replaced by train tracks and tunnels as the couple returns to Paris: the city’s bleak look is reinforced not by a mask of contentment but Covid face coverings. Even so, Sara and Jean still seem happy in each other’s company. Then Sara spots François and mentions doing so to Jean. The atmosphere in the comfortable apartment changes utterly and, one senses, irrevocably.
This transformation is achieved by the superb acting of Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon. They were why I decided to watch Claire Denis’s new film, despite intending, after I’d seen Beau Travail a few years ago, not to bother with any more of her work. The U-turn was rewarded, for a while. It used to be said that a good actor could read from the telephone directory and still hold an audience’s attention. This kind of magic – or its visual equivalent – is in evidence in early scenes of Both Sides of the Blade. When Jean cuts up a lettuce or pays for petrol at a garage, Vincent Lindon makes the spectacle fascinating. When Sara sees François, you may not think, ‘Ooh, look, she’s gripped by a primal urge’, but that’s hardly a cause for regret: watching emotionally fine-tuned Juliette Binoche working as subtly as she does at the start is more than satisfying. But Binoche and Lindon’s best efforts are increasingly stymied by their director’s approach.
The impact of the immediate aftermath to Sara’s ‘glimpse’ of François makes you all the more conscious of the lengthy wait for the promised ‘eruption’. The delay seems meant to tantalise – as do brief references to Jean’s ‘injury’, ‘sentence’ and ‘project’, about which the script (by Denis and Christine Angot, adapted from the latter’s 2018 novel Un tournant de la vie) has little more to say. The viewer gradually manages to piece a picture together. Jean is a former rugby professional. His time in prison may have had something to do with shady businessman François. Jean is now trying to get back on his feet by launching his own business. The narrative’s cryptic quality seems quite unnecessary – until you start wondering, once the film eventually cranks up into romantic-triangle melodrama, if it’s designed to conceal how unoriginal and contrived the story is. Jean and François go back a long way – François mentions they went to the same school though Jean was in a senior year (which is putting it mildly – Vincent Lindon is sixteen years older than Grégoire Colin, and looks it). François wants Jean, instead of setting up independently, to join him as a talent scout in his new sports agency. Jean agrees, despite what happened when the two men worked together before and the effect that François is already now having on Jean’s relationship with Sara. What is Jean’s motive in asking for trouble? To take the plot forward.
Lavishly praising Both Sides of the Blade, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody notes that ‘The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust [the film] out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy’. Silence and confrontational rage combine most noticeably not in a showdown between Sara and Jean but in a scene between Jean and Marcus (Issa Perica), his mixed-race, fifteen-year-old son from a previous relationship. Marcus lives in Vitry, a working-class banlieue of Paris, under the care of Jean’s mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier). Although Marcus doesn’t want see his father, his disruptive behaviour at school causes Nelly to contact Jean, who makes repeated trips to Vitry. During one of these, he and Marcus talk about the boy’s future – or Jean does anyway. After Marcus mutters something about the extra career challenges faced by ‘Blacks and Arabs’, Jean launches into a long, furious tirade. It isn’t remotely overwhelmed by his son’s silence, which isn’t even Marcus’s choice: Jean simply won’t let him get a word in edgeways. Emotional immediacy – that is, the strength of Jean’s feelings at this particular moment – appears to overwhelm his awareness that he’s ranting at another person, one about whom he supposedly cares deeply. No wonder Marcus looks bewildered by the monologue – this viewer felt the same way.
One of the guests on Sara’s radio show is Lilian Thuram. Politically engagé before the end of his international football career, Thuram has continued to speak out publicly on racial and LGBTQ+ issues since his retirement from soccer. His appearance smacks of a quick way for Denis to confer on her film a political cachet it would otherwise lack but Richard Brody knows better: ‘Sara’s on-air discussion with … Thuram … [is] a vision of progress through discourse involving the unsparing reconsideration of the past, an ideal of liberation that treats public and private lives as inseparable’. Actually, Brody’s interpretation of this bit, and of the film as a whole, isn’t much harder to swallow than the idea of Claire Denis winning the Silver Bear for Best Director at this year’s Berlinale, where Both Sides of the Blade premiered. Yet she really did.
10 November 2022