Claire Denis can turn any premise into a lust-inducing esoteric object of desire, and she can turn any text into poetry. “Both Sides of the Blade,” a home drama by this talented French filmmaker, appears to be the plainest and most banal of all. When an old lover from their shared romantic history reappears, a middle-aged couple’s peaceful existence is shattered. But once again, the director of the brilliant mysteries Beau Travail and High Life has given her material—pulled from a novel by Christine Angot— a seductive and bewildering foreign rhythm.
A transitional cut crams more intrigue into a movie’s duration than most movies achieve in their full-lengths. The first few minutes of the film appear to be a dream. The fact that we first see Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon) having a wonderful time on vacation, splashing around in the waves off an unknown coast before they break into a passionate carnal embrace in their stylishly compact Parisian flat is a bad sign, just as few films that begin with a wedding end happily ever after. This prologue’s water is as clear as the history of the people who inhabit it.
Some unfinished business is hinted at by the wonderfully sinister beat of a new composition by Denis’s house band of choice, Tindersticks. At a small radio station, Sara is startled to see a man riding his motorcycle. As if she’s seen a ghost, she reacts as if it were the first time she’s ever seen it. There he is her long-lost love from a lifetime ago, François (Grégoire Colin). It’s no accident that he’s reappeared. In order to create a sports agency in Paris, François has invited Jean, the guy who seduced and then married his fiancée, to join him. That’s a good idea, too. After so long, it’s time to move on. They tell each other that, at least. Their eyes tell a different story. Denis, as usual, takes her time revealing this tale. She has a severe aversion to reading about other people’s lives. In this particular instance, it’s possible that’s a bad thing. There is no mention of why or how long Jean was imprisoned.
It’s possible that François had anything to do with it, although it’s never explicitly stated. Is Jean and Sara’s relationship pre-incarceration or post-incarceration? The timeframe is a constant source of confusion. During Jean’s incarceration, a custody agreement was negotiated for his adolescent son, Marcus (Issa Perica), to live with his grandmother (Bulle Ogier) in Vitry. There are a few sequences that touch on broader, more difficult subjects, but they don’t feel integrated into the movie’s slow-burning marital strife. For Denis, the emotional response is more important than the logical reasoning of a story. The performances of her stars, neither of whom are strangers to the trials and tribulations of a stopover in the this director’s sensual City of Lights, serve as our guide through this maze of whims. In Denis’s dialogue-light works, the body reveals what the mouth refuses to say. (Is there a director alive who is better capable of conveying emotional significance to an exposed shoulder blade?) The tensions that are being masked by evasive responses are being revealed by these cheating spouses.
Perhaps Binoche and Lindon, seasoned masters at scrawling secret messages on their faces, are playing the notes in between the notes.’ However, this does not rule out the possibility of an eruption: When François re-enters Binoche’s life and thoughts, she experiences the same kind of panic-attack need that erupts in Jean’s midlife wrath during the film’s final yelling confrontation. There is no nonlinear incomprehensibility in Both Sides of the Blade, unlike Denis’s most baffling work, such as The Intruder. Its elisions, on the other hand, keep you on the verge of comprehension—a flavour familiar to every admirer of this great director. Denis’ use of arrhythmic editing to gently disorient the audience expresses the breakdown of a marriage in formal terms, which is exhilarating to see. Interactions spanning several hours or even days are placed on top of one another to generate disconcerting tonal contrasts in the form of jump cuts.
There is a Lynchian nightmarish dread to this reunion between Sara and François in public, and it almost makes you doubt the veracity of what is happening onscreen. It’s hard to believe that anything we see can be believed. François, on the other hand, does not seem to have a distinct personality or shade of character. Rather than a real person, he’s more like an ephemeral wisp of recollection, the ghost lurking in the shadows of an apparently happy marriage. The outcome of Sara and Jean’s relationship had nothing to do with him. An elephant in the room is finally being addressed, and the ways that the mature, adult attitude to a situation might really be a deception to avoid facing the heart of one’s sentiments are explored in Both Sides of a Blade. People say a lot about what they don’t actually mean, but Denis, poet of the unspoken, knows how to interpret that. The director’s exuberantly confusing technique closes the distance between their statements and the truth.
Select cinemas have begun showing Both Sides of the Blade.