Old Yorker

  • Both Sides of the Blade

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • The Contender

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rod Lurie (2000)

    Democrat US President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) is close to completing his second four-year term.  His Vice-President, Troy Ellard, dies suddenly; Evans nominates Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) to succeed Ellard.  In describing Hanson’s rocky road to confirmation as Veep, the writer-director Rod Lurie combines political chicanery drama with, eventually, pious hope for the new millennium.  The Contender can hardly fail to seem antiquated now:  truth has gotten much stranger than fiction in American politics in the decades since it was made.  The fact that the current Vice-President really is female is the least of the movie’s problems on a viewing today.  The Contender was first released a couple of weeks before a US presidential election whose resolution was as dramatic, and perhaps as dodgy, as anything that happens in the film.  The Florida recount shenanigans in late 2000 were hearteningly eclipsed, eight years later, by the straightforward election of an African-American President.  And then there’s Trump.  His baleful impact has mired much of American politics in you-couldn’t-make-it-up land for the foreseeable future.  (Writing on the subject in the TLS the other week, Ferdinand Mount noted that ‘We have miles to go before we sleep’.)  The nefarious behaviour that Rod Lurie puts on screen is paltry in comparison.

    The Contender (which I first saw in 2001 or thereabouts) is still entertaining, though, and Lurie gives his story sustained momentum.  The President’s nomination of Senator Hanson takes Washington DC by surprise.  The favourite to succeed Ellard is Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), Governor of Virginia, who’s become a national hero just at the right time.  When a car crashes into the lake where he’s fishing, Hathaway fearlessly dives in to try and save the driver trapped in her vehicle.  The attempt fails but does wonders for Hathaway’s poll ratings.  He seems a decent chap:  although acutely disappointed not to be nominated, he takes the President’s decision on the chin.  According to the 25th Amendment, Laine Hanson’s name requires the approval of both houses of Congress.  The process is led by a bipartisan advise-and-content committee chaired by Republican Congressman Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), who’s vehemently opposed to Hanson.  (Despite their different party allegiances, Runyon’s also an old friend of Hathaway’s and thinks him well qualified to be Vice-President.)  He turns up an incident from Hanson’s student days, with photographs that purport to show her engaged in drunken sex as part of a sorority initiation.  When Runyon raises this in the confirmation hearings, Hanson simply refuses to discuss the matter:  in her view, her personal past is no one else’s business.  The photos of the ‘orgy’, supposedly featuring a naked Hanson, circulate in the media.  The scandal escalates.  Jackson Evans looks set to change his mind and put forward Jack Hathaway after all …

    Rod Lurie gives his actors plenty of juicy dialogue and is rewarded with some good performances.  Joan Allen is excellent.  Her Laine Hanson is the embodiment of bland competence and a lightning-quick brain.  The difference in how she comes over on and off (a TV) camera seems exactly right.  Jeff Bridges’s playing is broader but enjoyable.  Not everyone fares so well.  Sam Elliott overplays the White House Chief of Staff (it doesn’t help that the character’s forename is Kermit).  Supporting Runyon in his opposition to Hanson’s nomination is a fresh-faced, idealistic young Democrat Representative – an idea rather than a person who, in Christian Slater’s hands, stays that way.  The political wives in the set-up (who don’t include a First Lady) have very minor roles:  it’s not surprising the actresses playing Mrs Hathaway and Mrs Runyon – Kristen Shaw and Irene Ziegler respectively – grab their limited opportunities too eagerly.  But Gary Oldman makes up for a lot.  He gets right inside Shelly Runyon, a rat-like but seemingly sincere reactionary.  It’s one of Oldman’s finest pieces of screen acting.

    Engaging as The Contender is, it’s full of unconvincing or puzzling things (including the title, which suggests someone entering a competition:  why not ‘The Nominee’?)  It’s important that Jackson Evans is nearing the end of his second term – appointing a glass-ceiling-breaking woman Vice-President will be his ‘swan song’ – but there’s never a word about who’s in the running to succeed him in the White House.  The film appears to be set in a fictional present day; as the smart, affable, opportunist President, Jeff Bridges channels Bill Clinton (the actual President, nearing the end of his eighth year in the job, when The Contender came out) to the hilt.  It’s therefore confusing to hear that Senator Hanson voted ‘to impeach President Clinton’.  She did so as a Republican, which raises a larger issue.  Runyon’s animus towards her is partly to do with his loathing of affirmative action and abortion rights but also because he sees Hanson as a turncoat.  It’s unclear what purpose Lurie means her recent conversion to serve and his script ignores how it sits with her Democrat colleagues or is reflected in poll ratings.  Her switch of party just seems to muddy the water.

    Lurie also makes Hanson an upfront atheist without acknowledging the major implications of that in the electoral world of America.  There’ve been US Presidents and Vice-Presidents accused by political rivals of irreligion, others whose claims to be Christian were dubious, to say the least, but none was a card-carrying unbeliever.  Lurie presents his heroine’s atheism as part of her modernity but it doesn’t make sense – especially in view of how often The Contender mentions what ‘the American people’ want, can stomach, and so on.  No less implausible is that Hanson’s nomination isn’t immediately doomed when the accusations and photos come to light.  The film’s story is premised on misogynist prejudice:  the protagonist’s contention, which Rod Lurie appears to share, is that a male politician’s indiscretions wouldn’t be held against him.  Maybe that’s why Bill Clinton is mentioned by name (there’s nothing about Jackson Evans’s sex life) – as a reminder that he survived as President despite Monica Lewinsky and, before that, as leader in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1992 despite Gennifer Flowers.  It’s hardly the case that these scandals weren’t big news, though, and Clinton, at the time, seemed unusually lucky not to be sunk by them.  Gary Hart, his predecessor as Democrat front runner only five years earlier, might not agree that the media and voters weren’t bothered about his extra-marital activities.  Be that as it may, The Contender argues that there’s one law for men and another for women in American politics.  So how does Laine Hanson have a hope of surviving?

    None of this might matter as much if The Contender was a mocking hatchet job.  In that case, you might be more prepared to accept realism as subordinate to satirical imperative.  For a while, the film seems as if it could be heading in this direction; even well into the story, there are cynical highlights.  The revelation that the lake incident was a put-up job – Jack Hathaway paid the woman in the car to drive off the bridge (though she wasn’t supposed to drown) – has cynical force, along with the President’s relish in announcing this at a meeting to which he has summoned Hathaway, Runyon and Hanson.  But Rod Lurie changes tack almost laughably in the closing stages.  Early on, I took the familiar, vaguely heroic phrases in Larry Groupé’s score to be ironic; at the climax, it was clear they were meant to be taken straight.  Jackson Evans refuses to accept Laine Hanson’s request that he withdraw her nomination.  His amusing pragmatism lurches into sanctimony as he addresses Congress and Shelly Runyon in particular.  ‘It pains my soul,’ he informs Runyon, ‘to tell you that you have brought blood and shame under this great dome’.  Vanquished vermin Runyon tries to skulk out of the chamber but Evans continues:

    ‘… you may walk out on me, you may walk out on this body but you cannot walk out on the will of the American people.  Americans are a good people, they’re a just people, Mr Runyon, and they will forgive you, but they will not forget.  Hate and ego have no place residing in what my good friend Laine Hanson calls the chapel of democracy.’

    It sounds bogus but isn’t meant to be.  Larry Groupé’s triumphal music swells.  The Contender carries a closing dedication ‘For our Daughters’.

    4 November 2022

     

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