Both Sides of the Blade

MOVIE #1,410 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.01.24 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙲𝙻𝙰𝙸𝚁𝙴 𝙳𝙴𝙽𝙸𝚂 (𝙵𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚑: [selin sjama];) 𝙳𝙸𝚁𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙾𝚁 𝙵𝙾𝙲𝚄𝚂 Today we close the books on this Claire Denis Director Focus with her two 2022 features. They are both imperfect entries made in the COVID era (without directly addressing COVID), i.e. the characters are wearing masks and occasionally a reference will be made to the virus offhand. In a way, this made me more conscious of Denis’s realist flair. I also can’t think of another example in recent cinema where this element is so casually deployed. It merely exists to ground the viewer in a time-specific setting. Seeing masks on every person in the subway is like seeing in the Twin Towers pre-2001 or watching an actor operate a flip phone.

The Denis films I’ve liked best are the thrillers with either a central or subplot focusing on some sort of evil. And here one develops, albeit with much tamer action than we saw in Bastards or The Intruder. I’ve often seen the music of frequent collaborator Tindersticks, the rock band who has scored seven of Denis’s pictures, highlighted and — while I’ve often enjoyed it — here it’s too much: the score is really telling us how we should feel instead of letting otherwise more nuanced moments speak for themselves.

I kept waiting for this to turn darker, but it’s more or less a classic love triangle tale. The plot concerns Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin starting a sports agency together as they vie for the affection of Lindon’s wife and Colin’s old flame, Juliette Binoche. This seems like the wrong ingredient. Before they would have been hitmen or something similarly nefarious. Add in Binoche’s NPR host day job where political points are literally shoehorned into the action, and this feels like a photocopy of a photocopy of a Denis film, even if the tone set by the music and camerawork and editing all say otherwise. So — especially knowing Denis so well at this point — it creates an uncanny valley-esque effect: what we're seeing is raw and emotional but it's not dangerous in the way we might expect. This feels like a trick and maybe it is, but Denis has earned our trust so we have to welcome the messiness of this late style to a degree. It's no surprise that these two 2022 pictures are among the longest she’s ever made.

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Both Sides of the Blade (formerly known in English as Fire; French: Avec amour et acharnement, lit. 'With Love and Fury') is a 2022 French romantic drama film directed by Claire Denis, who wrote the screenplay with Christine Angot. The film is based on Angot's 2018 novel Un tournant de la vie. It stars Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon, and Grégoire Colin. It had its world premiere at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Bear, while Denis received the Silver Bear for Best Director. It was released on February 12, 2022.