At first blush, Both Sides of the Blade is the biggest outlier in Claire Denis’s filmography since Let the Sunshine In. Though its opening images of two lovers, Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon), blissfully swimming in the sea as the camera bobs above and under the water with their entwined embraces befits the director’s sensual style, the film soon settles into an uncharacteristic inertness. When Sara and Jean return home to their flat, their marital bliss is complicated by the way that Denis and cinematographer Éric Gautier use the apartment’s dividing areas to separate them. Sara gazes longingly at Jean, for example, but their proximity is complicated by the fact that she is watching him through the sliding glass that opens up to the balcony where he stands. And as in the apartment in Éric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale, the living room is pointedly bifurcated by a massive support column that often literally comes between the couple.
Denis’ films have always operated along an accumulation of insinuation and blink-and-miss-them visual cues, and there are elements of that here, particularly in the slow revelation that the opening scene is a reunion of partners after Jean spent years in prison due to being sold out by his former business partner and best friend, François (Grégoire Colin), who was also Sara’s ex. But in an unexpected twist, this is perhaps Denis’ most bluntly articulated film, with characters swapping the usual loose poetics of her scripts for theatrical declamations in which they plainly state their feelings. This comes to the fore when Sara catches a glimpse of François one day on her way to work and something shifts in her that causes her to fixate on what might have been. She even tells Jean of her unexpected stirring, but he dismisses her unmissably erotic tones, and he even enters into a business agreement with the man who sold him out.
Jean’s reestablished ties to François naturally puts the latter into renewed contact with Sara, and her anxiety over her own feelings leads to gradually escalating conflict with Jean. Lindon, with his alchemical mix of imposing and vulnerable screen presence, forever looks like he’s tensed in Jean’s stoic refusal to engage with Sara’s attempts to bait him into an argument, but the actor’s sad, almost Bogart-esque hangdog expressions reveal Jean desperate to hang on to Sara after having lost everything else. For her part, Binoche gives an elemental performance worthy of the film’s original, ill-fitting English title, Fire. As in Let the Sunshine In, Binoche plays Sara as a woman in middle age at last cutting loose and not caring who she offends as she casts about belatedly for a purpose in life. She captures Sara’s unpredictable, contradictory behavior with such believability that when the film regularly cuts from an argument between the couple to the pair in bed passionately making love, the juxtaposition never feels like a joke or an easy gag on makeup sex but rather an expression of how easily she can experience multiple emotions at once.
Slowly, the poetry creeps in, albeit in a circumspect way. Denis’ characters always stand in for a larger, less tangible battle of wills and natural forces, and here Jean and Sara come to represent flip-sides of a debate on how one reconciles with the past. For Jean, desperation to put his prison stint behind him not only for his career but basic existential need, which helps explain why he would be willing to reconnect with François. Sara, meanwhile, believes no one can escape their past, which is the closest one gets to a motivation for how quickly she feels long-dead flames rekindle for François.
Both Sides of the Blade occasionally falters, though, when this conflict is extrapolated into how the characters deal with larger social issues. Sara works as a radio presenter for a news station where she conducts interviews with reporters in war zones, and the glitchy, tinny Zoom chats feel both like one more element of the film’s pointed setting during COVID as their content addresses global postcolonial conflicts and how history accumulates into violent ruptures. Jean, on the other hand, shows his refusal to consider background in how he deals with his half-Black, semi-estranged son, Marcus (Issa Perica), who is struggling in school and on the cusp of expulsion. When Marcus references racial struggles, Jean blithely warns him not to participate in “the discourse” and rejects any factors in a person’s behavior outside their self-control. The meaning of such side plots is obvious, but Denis never properly connects them to a wider critique, so they feel like forced attempts to bring the outside world into an insular story for no real reason.
It’s that insularity that gives the film its slowly escalating suspense. Denis has made more outwardly erotic thrillers, from the vampiric Trouble Every Day to the stomach-churning, conspiratorial Bastards, but Both Sides of the Blade fascinatingly works her grasp of sensual mystery away from eruptions of violence to a more grounded, coming-of-middle-age moment of self-actualization. The releases here are not cathartic but epiphanic, and even somewhat funny in the way that the film suggests that one of the few ways to leave one’s past behind them in the modern world is to lose their saved data.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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