“Both Sides of the Blade,” Reviewed: Claire Denis’s Politics of Privacy

Claire Denis’s recent collaborations with the actress Juliette Binoche have all been modernist twists on classic genres, starting with “Let the Sunshine In,” a screwball comedy, and “High Life,” a work of science fiction. The latest, “Both Sides of the Blade,” which opens Friday, is a romantic melodrama; it lays bare the societal circumstances that play a decisive role in a middle-aged couple’s life together, and it does so without stinting on direct and passionate emotional expression. If melodrama is the art of exaggeration, presenting the lives of everyday people in the terms and the tone of tragedy, Denis approaches the genre as the art of democratic authenticity, of truth. She treats her characters’ story like a mirror for the earnestness and the dignity with which they view themselves, and she displays the public conditions, the web of power and authority, that get in the way—and that are nonetheless inseparable from the way that they see themselves. (The film premièred in New York, in March, under the title “Fire,” yet neither title comes close to the impact of the original French one, “Avec Amour et Acharnement,” “With Love and Relentlessness.”)

There’s something Edenic about the romance of Sara (Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon), who are first seen frolicking and intertwining, playfully and passionately, in the sumptuous isolation of the sea. But the pristine abstraction of natural splendor soon smacks up against infrastructure—the complex awe of the train and tracks and tunnels that bring them back home to Paris and to the practicalities that soon snap them out of their romantic dream. They live in a comfortable but cramped apartment in a nondescript modern building with sliding glass doors and a balcony that affords only tangled, workaday city vistas. Sara is a radio host whose show blends talk and music; on her way to work, she happens to espy François (Grégoire Colin), an ex—and, from a distance, the glimpse seems to tear open the scar tissue of a long-healed romantic wound. François is a somewhat shady businessman and a longtime younger friend of Jean, who is a former professional rugby player and an ex-con who is trying to launch a business of his own. François wants Jean to join him in a sports agency as a scout.

“Both Sides of the Blade” is an update of the classic romantic triangle, which Denis inscribes on a much more elaborate geometry of politics, history, geography, memory, and mores. All the more remarkably, she does so without disrupting the textures of realistic drama—yet, here, that familiar form comes off not as a mere unquestioned conventional method but as a conscious choice, an element of character psychology. The movie’s unity of form mirrors the unity and coherence that its two central lovers impose on their own lives, despite the loose-ended and disruptive contingencies that they confront. The three protagonists are white; Jean is from the working-class suburb of Vitry, where his fifteen-year-old son, Marcus (Issa Perica), who is of mixed race and presents as Black, lives with Jean’s mother, Nelly (the great Bulle Ogier), who is raising him. Marcus, a troubled student, has cut off contact with Jean, who remains devoted to him, to Nelly, and, for that matter, to Vitry. Jean’s travels by car to his former home town, even to shop for groceries and buy gasoline, are no mere details but virtual X-rays of his own identity. He pays with cash—he has no credit card, owing to his legal trouble. He loves to drive, as if isolating himself in public, not least because his personal matters are the relentless subject of official scrutiny. But the world impinges on his automotive bubble when he listens to Sara’s wide-ranging political and cultural discussions on the radio.

Privacy plays an outsized role in Jean’s life—indeed, every time he utters the word “private,” it comes as a jolt and packs weighty implications. What Jean chooses to suppress, what he considers off-limits, what’s beyond the pale of discretion—it’s all bewildering to Sara, who, for her part, is a talker, both professionally and domestically. She can’t keep her disturbing glimpse of François to herself—it sparks an elaborate reminiscence that seems intended to assuage Jean’s jealousy yet also has a desperate edge of self-persuasion. Jean avoids the past, claims to forget the details, speaks in generalities about his life, appears to carry an enormous weight of painful experience, and attempts to rewrite his life on the blanked-out slate of the present tense. But then Sara’s past comes roaring back with a fury that menaces their future together.

Denis’s film, based on a novel by Christine Angot (they co-wrote the script), revels in the resonant details that compose the couple’s life, the material elements of cars and credit cards and business cards, the daily COVID-time routines of using masks and vaccine passes, the distinct experiences of public and private transportation, negotiations in offices, the timing of business trips, the uses and abuses of cell phones, the happenstance perspectives afforded by streets and windows (the apartment’s balcony is a virtual character in the drama). “Both Sides of the Blade” offers a pointillistic agglomeration of the petty concerns and coincidences on which major life decisions depend, an intensified exaggeration of the ironies that are built into melodrama, the contrast between petty doings and grand emotions that, in many Hollywood classics of the genre, often arouses viewers’ laughter. For Denis, there’s nothing comedic or absurd in the contrast; she subtracts the pettiness from details and invests them with grandeur by bearing witness to their furious emotional effect on the characters. (Several arguments of an apocalyptic ferocity are centered on quasi-forensic debates over infinitesimal yet ever-so-significant gestures.)

“Both Sides of the Blade” is a catalogue of closeups of urgent intimacy. Working with the cinematographer Éric Gautier, Denis keeps uncomfortably close to her protagonists and holds them onscreen as if trapped under the camera’s scrutiny, magnifying their tensions and their tremors to seismic events. With abrupt editing, confrontational gazes, emotional aggression, rugged physicality, and screen-rending arguments, Denis is doing more than revising the tones of golden-age movie romances; she’s challenging and reforming a crucial local cinematic monument. The movie is her reconstruction of films by the late Maurice Pialat and, in particular, a revision of his own furious drama of middle-aged and male-centered romance, “We Won’t Grow Old Together,” from 1972. For Denis, the revision involves a vision of a woman’s freedom and the multifaceted obstacles that even an accomplished professional woman of prominent public status confronts in her effort at self-definition and emotional self-realization. Denis gives the private silences that fill and haunt the movie a radical critique by way of an extended, and fascinating, philosophical interlude involving Sara’s on-air discussion with another former athlete, the real-life retired soccer star Lilian Thuram, a Black man who has written about France’s politics of race and ambient racism. It’s 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. ♦