Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement)

 

Director Claire Denis

novelist Christine Angot

Denis with Angot and Juliette Binoche

Denis with Vincent Lindon and Binoche

Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE (Avec amour et acharnement)         B+                                       aka:  Fire                                                                                                                                  France  (116 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Claire Denis

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self.  The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mache horse.   —Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love, 1954

A film that may haunt you for days, somehow changing the French title from With Love and Fury, which works extremely well, to the entitled Tindersticks song that concludes the film, Tindersticks - Both Sides of the Blade (Official Video) - YouTube (4:05), Claire Denis has made yet another boldly provocative film that dissects modern relationships with a curious eye, emphasizing betrayal and the fractious state of our lives, revealing how easily the past protrudes into the present, rupturing the status quo with a destabilizing force.  Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival, Denis won the Silver Bear as Best Director, with the film introduced under the title Fire, yet Denis strongly objected, claiming it was not fitting, choosing a better title that represented what the film is about.  Using familiar faces in Claire Denis films, co-written (with Denis) and adapted from Christine Angot’s 2018 novel, Un tournant de la vie, or A Turning Point in Life, Angot’s influence is built around introspective studies of women’s desire for men, as she is the same playwright of Let the Sunshine In (Un Beau Soleil Intérieur) (2017), both starring Juliette Binoche, among the more courageous actresses of our era, again playing a flawed woman making questionable choices, bringing back Vincent Lindon from VENDREDI SOIR (2002) and 2013 Top Ten List #6 Bastards (Les Salauds), Mati Diop from 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #1 35 Shots of Rum (2008), while in the same film Grégoire Colin was her boyfriend, making this his eighth appearance in a Denis film, only 16 when he first worked with her, also appearing in Nenette and Boni (Nénette et Boni) (1996), Beau Travail (1999), The Intruder (L’intrus) (2004), and 2013 Top Ten List #6 Bastards (Les Salauds).  Hardly a happy reunion, what starts out as an affectionate portrait of a healthy relationship suddenly turns sour, as Sara (Juliette Binoche) is a middle-age Parisian radio host who engages in constructive on-air social justice commentary, hosting real-life commentators that include Lebanese educator Hind Darwish and French soccer star-turned-activist Lilian Thuram, who discusses the idea of being locked into “white thinking,” a topic that turns into the disruptive impact of the French colonial past and how it continues to wreak havoc on the present, troublesome subjects that mirror the unraveling of this seemingly perfect relationship.  Sara is financially and professionally secure in her decade-long relationship with her unemployed boyfriend Jean (Vincent Lindon), a former professional rugby player with a prison record, but everything changes when Sara catches a random glance on the street of her ex-boyfriend François, Grégoire Colin, a heartthrob in DREAMLIFE FOR ANGELS (1998) and since then almost always playing the object of desire, unexpectedly reemerging after a ten-year absence, sending her into an emotional tailspin, bringing in a rush of new sensations that completely disrupt and alter her world, violating the opening Edenesque tranquility on the beaches of Corsica (apparently shot with an iPhone) that is so eloquently presented.  A long single take through a dark railway tunnel as the couple returns to Paris seems to have ominous implications, completely darkening their outlook, like one of those playful twists in Rivette’s CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (1974).  Ostensibly an elaborate character study constructed around the derailing repercussions spiraling out of control emanating from the dubiously shady François, a kind of nefarious film noir character that feels more like an apparition or a figment of the imagination, yet he forges a business relationship with Jean (deftly avoiding the prison sentence that Jean served), working as a talent scout identifying young developing rugby players.  The couple is haunted by his reappearance, not just a former lover of Sara’s but a former best friend of Jean’s, having left François for Jean, yet Sara is understandably ecstatic as she holds her emotions in check, with Binoche’s head poking through the bathroom door like an eerie reference to Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING (1980), Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) new clip official from Berlin Film Festival 1/2 YouTube (1:27), outwardly pretending she has no ulterior motive while encouraging Jean that this might present an excellent opportunity, both dancing around the topic like a hot potato, each one hiding something.  Immediately red flags are raised, as a growing suspicion develops between the lead couple, yet never acknowledged, as they become more testy with each other, where there are signs everywhere that they blindly ignore, like Jean and François regularly meeting on the corner outside their apartment, never inviting him up, almost always conducting their business at night, Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) new clip official from Berlin Film Festival 2/2 YouTube (44 seconds), creating a brooding, underlying tension that borders on a thriller.

Few filmmakers have been able to demonstrate the kind of range that Denis has managed to achieve throughout her career, from post-colonial explorations to innovative experimentations within various genres, a director who tends to work instinctively, developing relationships with her collaborators, and refuses to spell things out for her audience, yet broadens the reach of the “female gaze” in every picture while remaining an essential part of the contemporary landscape of cinema.  Part of her skill is amassing sensual detail as she poetically realizes texture and rhythm in establishing continually shifting moods, often wordlessly, leaving gaping holes in the narrative while finding new ways to tell stories, moving her characters around like chess pieces, yet one constant is just how intelligently she imbues each film with her own existentialist perspective.  While Christine Angot’s earlier work was a sex comedy, this is a darker subject, more exasperating, with Denis adding a female counterpoint to her male-dominated 2013 Top Ten List #6 Bastards (Les Salauds), plunging into the depths of personal destruction, exploring the intensely personal interiority of a love triangle, with Sara at the center, as her startled reaction at seeing François sets the story in motion, more of a melodramatic swoon, arousing something deeply unsettling stirring inside, drawing all three lives into a web of deception and desire as François tries to wedge his way back into her life, yet the obvious question is why does he matter so much?  Denis spares us the details, and only slowly provides any backstory, as all that matters is that her life implodes with a stunning force as she starts living a lie, exploring how love moves in unpredictable ways, often from one partner to the next.  It’s like watching poetry in motion to see the extent that Binoche becomes a master of artful deception, a heroine in distress yearning to test the waters once again, with the past coming back with a ferocity, reminding her of memories that have been missing in her life, though it happens imperceptibly at first.  The way she immediately succumbs at seeing him only heightens the significance of the mysterious François, kept out of sight mostly, allowing the inexplicable allure of his murky character to literally inhabit the couple, each in their own way, carefully concealing their private thoughts from the other, seemingly dwelling in darker spaces.  Creating a sports agency, they eventually choose a location for their business, having an opening night party with friends and family invited, yet Jean hesitates to invite Sara, as if afraid a spark might reignite, so he downplays this decision with Sara, acting casual, like she can certainly come if she wants, but he’ll be busy with invited guests, not really having time to spend with her.  This only heightens her anticipation, getting all worked up, vacillating between love and fury, unable to set foot inside, disturbed by what she’s really feeling, as she could publicly lose herself in the moment, so instead she remains outside, calling Jean, who puts François on the phone, and all bets are off, as she literally melts at the sound of his voice.  Agnès Godard has been the regular cinematographer for Claire Denis since 1990, providing that lushly visualized poetic texture she is known for, yet she was unavailable in 2021, so this is the director’s first venture with Éric Gautier, who worked on and off with Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, and Alain Resnais, more recently with Jia Zhang-ke in Ash Is Purest White (Jiang hu er nv) (2018), utilizing close-ups with a sense of urgency, especially during heated arguments, with the camera holding close to Binoche’s remarkable reactions filled with naked emotion, a wise choice, subjecting each character with a sense of scrutiny, as it tells the interior story, seemingly trapped by the moment, exposing all underlying tensions.  Shot during the Covid pandemic, using only a few locations, revealing a somewhat desolate city, requiring occasional scenes with masks, one recurring visual motif is the use of the apartment balcony overlooking the rooftops of Paris, like a character unto itself, with the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur seen off in the distance, as Jean typically takes business calls from François out there as his own private domain, yet the invasion of that territorial space leads to disastrous consequences, culminating into a series of excruciating fights.       

Jean is a complex character, yet always authentic, carrying the weight of a man who has struggled in his life and found it difficult to be happy, with Lindon, at times, on the verge of bashing in walls from frustration, while also showing a surprising amount of restraint, especially how he interacts with his biracial son Marcus, Issa Perica from Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables (2019), who is being raised by Jean’s very sweet elderly mother (Bulle Ogier), given custody after his ex-wife took off when he went to jail, both having difficulties with him, as he’s restless and wanders the streets, yet also on the verge of being expelled from school, another example of how the past comes back to haunt the present.  Yet it’s revealing how he tries to take control over the poor decisions Marcus is making, hoping he’ll realize the error of his ways, though hardly setting a good example himself, framing his arguments by suggesting his son has to make his own decisions, an apparent contradiction when he’s attempting to make the best decisions for him, with Jean distanced and estranged from the racial circumstances Marcus is facing, blinded by his own white perspective, feeling more like a helpless outsider watching his son’s life fall apart, the same role he unfortunately takes with Sara, becoming something of a jealous spectator.  This family visit, however, offers insight into his own tenuous relationship with Sara, where he also tries to control the narrative through his passive/aggressive tendencies, always suspecting she’s cheating on him, but she’s quick to deny his accusations through her own sense of moral outrage, indignant at his insinuations, leading to a kind of charade of changing emotions, as she always reassures him of her love even as she’s cheating behind his back.  What really stands out is the grown-up feel to this film, sparing nothing, exposing the vulnerabilities of each character, though much of it is told from a female perspective, with the initial pangs of desire felt so intensely by Sara, yet anxiety develops about decisions made in the past that now lead to recklessly impulsive acts, featuring interior passages from Binoche that no other director would have included, like continually murmuring his name in an elevator, or finding herself in the bathroom at night with rhapsodic soliloquies of sexual infatuation, suggesting “old loves never really die,” fearlessly surrendering to a resurgence of former passions, like blood rushing to her head, while at the same time betraying her partner, yet she’s one of the few major female stars who would allow their reputations to be stained by a duplicitous character like this.  It seems a bit like a newly revised version of VENDREDI SOIR, which also featured Vincent Lindon in a spontaneous one night stand, appearing here 20 years later in a more mature context, infused with adult responsibilities, yet he’s embroiled in another morality tale, but instead of falling for someone new, this film explores the eruptive force of an old flame.  Both rely upon a poetic female perspective, visually impressive, psychologically astute observations, featuring strong naturalistic performances, with a vibrant soundtrack by Stuart Staples from Tindersticks, a British alt-rock band that has composed every one of the director’s film scores except one (Beau Travail in 1999) since Nenette and Boni (Nénette et Boni) (1996), yet Denis always finds a unique angle to subvert familiar stories, going off the rails with blistering back and forth arguments at the heart of the drama that become a scream fest of unleashed fears, all initiated by a betrayal that was covered up in a wealth of lies.  Her own confusion feels outrageously melodramatic, yet that’s the novelty of the film, so over-exposed, so vulnerable, with so much to lose, yet she can’t help herself, lying every step of the way, creating a corrosive fissure in their built-up trust, blowing it wide open, where the more she’s caught, the more she covers up, ultimately ensnared by her own deceit.  While the brutality from the verbal fireworks can feel exhaustive, recalling the cruel explosions in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) (1973), there’s also an element of humor, as her phone, the instrument of her betrayal, making appointments and leaving text messages, has all the contents erased after she accidentally on purpose drops it in the bathwater while attempting to conceal the evidence.  It’s only fitting, perhaps, that her darkly acerbic day of reckoning quite literally disconnects her from her past, with the picture continuing to play out as the closing credits roll, adding another interesting development, a clever device rarely utilized in cinema.    

Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch In Conversation - YouTube  Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center, March 2022 (1:07:03)

2013 Top Ten List #6 Bastards (Les Salauds)

BASTARDS  (Les Salauds)     A        
France  Germany  (97 mi)  2013  d:  Claire Denis

One of the mysteries at Cannes this year was leaving this film out of competition, where easily one of the best films of the year was relegated to the second tier of Un Certain Regard films, especially since Claire Denis is one of the great artists working today, where you’d think France would want to showcase her unique talent.  The director herself may have been too modest about drawing attention to herself, which competition films tend to do, at least for the first screening anyway where it’s like the creator is the very center of the universe, as all eyes are on the film while enthusiasts around the word await the critical results.  For most, it’s an enviable position, as cinema’s most prestigious festival provides so much free publicity, but Denis shirks the limelight and retains a more private profile, allowing each one of her films to speak for themselves.  Due to the narrative ambiguities in nearly all her films, they’re often misunderstood initially and gain more of a critical following only much later.  The reasons for this are the inherent complexities of her films, which often take some time to digest, and aren’t suited for one time only, knee-jerk reactions.  Nonetheless, the announcement of a new Claire Denis film is always a major cinematic “event,” as the director has simply never made a bad film and continues to make challenging works that are both intelligent and adult in nature.  Loosely drawing upon William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931), Denis raises similar unspeakably dark themes of rampant drug use, corruption, family betrayal, infidelity, incest, lurid sexual crimes, as well as corncob rape sequences, all of which leads the viewer into a downward spiraling cesspool of utterly despicable human behavior.  As bleak and downbeat a film as you will see all year, it continually surprises, however, with fractured narrative ambiguity, visual mastery from cinematographer Agnès Godard, and superb leading performances from Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni. 

Working for the first time with a digital camera, the director’s usual methodical long takes, including static wide shots of landscapes mixed with tight close ups are replaced here by the suffocating intimacy of a handheld camera, giving the film a jagged, deeply fragmented syle, shot mostly using claustrophobic interior locations, creating a deeply unsettling, psychologically disturbing look at French sex trafficking and prostitution scandals involving powerful men of great wealth.  Denis indicated the film started with an idea she had after watching several Kurosawa films from the 50’s and 60’s starring Toshirô Mifune, which made her think of Vincent Lindon’s body, solid, sexy, “a body you can trust, a solid body you can lean on.  In Kurosawa’s films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.  My film started with that body.”  Denis also read a news story about a young woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster.  In this film, set in the unrelenting bleakness of a noirish nightmare, she imagines a backdrop to her story.  Opening in a torrent of rain that obscures our view out the window, while inside a man is seen through a doorway staring at the image in the shower, creating a sense of intimacy and voyeurism.  Then, an intrusion, as if from another world, where a young girl (Lola Créton) in heels is seen dazed and naked wandering down an empty Parisian street at night, stumbling out of the house where her father has committed suicide (never explained), and her mother (Julie Bataille) is being led away by the police, blaming everyone in sight,   It happens so quickly we’re not sure of the relationships, only that it takes place in the flicker of a murky gloom, becoming the darkest movie Denis has ever made, where characters are literally submerged in the incessant foul play. 

Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon) is a ship captain that receives news of the suicide while at sea, where he’s dropped off to come to the aid of his sister Sandra (Bataille) and niece Justine (Créton), who ends up in a psychiatric hospital.  The family business of women’s shoes has gone belly up with bills it can’t hope to pay, where his sister blames it all on the actions of wealthy international financier Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor) who has bankrupted her husband’s business.  Marco rents a flat in the same building as Laporte, where he’s immediately intrigued by his sexually attractive partner, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni).  The building itself becomes a centerpiece of the film, where the massive interiors are barely lit, suggesting an unfillable emptiness, and an insatiable desire, where Marco and Raphaëlle, who is almost always left alone, begin a torrid affair, with Godard  illuminating the faces in close up shots that appear like lurking shadows.  While the erotic moments become the most stable aspects of his multi-layered life, Marco becomes the moral center of the film, symbolized as the virtuous, male protective body, taking care of Raphaëlle’s restless insecurities while looking after Sandra and Justine as well.  Denis clearly sympathizes with the caged-like plight of the femme fatale character of Raphaëlle, making great efforts for the audience to identify with her complications and moral ambiguity, where she could just as easily be the protagonist of the film, which is why the finale is so shockingly effective.  In someone else’s hands, it would never have the unmistakable poetry, where Denis’s approach is more delicate, subtle, and nuanced.  The film is a The Intruder (L’intrus)-like trip into the heart of darkness, where the dysfunctional family element provides a theme of contamination and infection reminiscent of Trouble Every Day (2001), an immaculate noir in the classical sense, dark and convoluted, where Denis offers empathy for her characters throughout. 

The voyeuristic aspect of the film intrudes into the audience as well, as we clearly get inside the head of characters who are both being watched and those doing the watching, with both forces eventually brought together in an erotic embrace, where we again project ourselves into the drama without actually leaving our seats.  Of interest is the way Denis holds the audience in rapt attention by the way she films the seduction scene.  Typically in film noir the femme fatale lures the hero into a compromising position, but here Marco is actively seducing Raphaëlle, shown with his back to the camera, where the audience sees the effects of her sexual longing, often changing the focus and perspective between them, continually sucking the audience into this lurid world of sexual intrigue.  But Marco hasn’t a clue what kind of world he’s returning to, having been away at sea, avoiding all family ties and responsibilities, where his family dysfunction, like that of Raphaëlle’s world, is clouded in a maze of secrets and deception, the kind that only money can protect, not best intentions, where he couldn’t possibly understand the deep-seeded ramifications of just how far his sister and her husband would abdicate their parental responsibilities, allowing the film to touch upon issues of sexual exploitation that open doors into horror and terror.  By the time the audience gets wind of just how prevalent the danger is surrounding this man, with people driven by base impulses, where particularly odious is a skin-crawling incest subplot, with literally everyone around him synonymous with the film’s title, we realize that he’s doomed, unable to extract himself from this sinking quicksand that is the moral abyss he’s found himself in, which only makes the enveloping dread and anguish more devastating.  Played out like a fever dream where love is nonexistent but delusion is everpresent, we watch the slow, poisoned, self-inflicted destruction of two family units, one irreparably shattered, the other hanging by a thread, where the exposure of their secrets rises like a dark shadow out of the ashes of doom.

Augustine

AUGUSTINE         B              

France  (101 mi)  2012  d:  Alice Winocour

Another strangely unsettling Victorian era mood piece, recalling Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), where more is reflected in tone, unspoken thoughts, and atmospheric visualization than actually providing details or understandable information, written by the first time feature director, where she pulls a story from real life historical events, what little is known, and then reimagines how it might have all played out, finding feminist sentiments within her fictionalized storyline, while keeping her characters completely within their straightjacketed historical times.  What starts out as an 1890’s dissection of class divisions ends up as a bizarre study of sexual dominance.  The key choice here is the brilliant casting of Soko (singer) (aka Stéphanie Sokolinski), a popular singer in France playing the stricken patient Augustine, an illiterate housemaid serving a wealthy aristocratic family, who suffers an epileptic seizure that causes panic at an evening dinner party, where one of the female hosts rather indelicately throws a pitcher of water in her face.  Partially paralyzed afterwards and something of an embarrassment, she’s immediately shuffled off to Salpêtrière Hospital, a sanitarium where the all-male physician staff treats exclusively female patients, where there were as many as 3000 female patients under the care of the chief resident, Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), where he worked and taught for 33 years, drawing students from all over Europe to learn from him.  His neurological studies predate the field of psychiatry, where the distress suffered by these women was commonly called hysteria, which amounted to seizures and violent sexual fits, both mental and physical disorders that he believed to be an organic condition brought on by trauma, where in the 16th century these women would have been condemned as witches.  To the casual observer, most of the patients were more likely suffering mental disorders, where the hospital was a giant storage grounds housing afflicted women.

When Augustine suffers another seizure on the grounds, she catches the eye of Charcot, not really her medical affliction, but her irrepressible beauty, where in his mind she can become his prized patient arousing interest within the medical profession, as currently the financial operations has a hard time providing enough meat for all the patients.  From the start, an ethically and emotionally complicated relationship develops between doctor and patient, where like a dog and pony show, Charcot shows off Augustine as his cash cow, literally staging her in front of other physicians allowing them to examine her in a state of undress, poking and prodding her like a medical specimen, reminiscent of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), another historical film obsessed with the naked female anatomy, where sex in the scientific community is never spoken or admitted to, but everything is explained and justified in detailed scientific vernacular.  “You use big words to say simple things,” Augustine tells him, responding to the routine of undressing in front of Charcot, an act of debased brutality and horror if he’s not there, taking a certain pleasure in pleasing him when he is.  Everything has a sexual context for her, though it’s all expressed silently in facial expressions and body movements, as she rarely utters a word.  What we don’t realize initially, of course, is the underlying sexual subtext for the treating doctor, who goes about his business in a thoroughly detached examination process where everything is expressed clinically, all an act to cover up his inner sexual tensions, as he’s more than a little obsessed by this remarkable young woman. The film ignores addressing the medical question of male hysteria while allowing it to dominate the physician’s thoughts throughout, becoming a power play of restraint and social manners, where sex is an unseen force overwhelming everyone’s controlled and orderly lives, where in the picture of restraint, Augustine and Charcot take endless walks in a suffocating fog.

Chiara Mastroianni plays Charcot’s independently wealthy wife, a woman of influence, and certainly capable of seeing through him, though she maintains a respectable distance, never interfering in his profession.  It’s her connections initially that lure highly influential physicians to visit Charcot’s medical exhibitions, which play out as pure theater before a leering male audience, inducing Augustine into a submissive state through hypnosis, resembling an exorcism, as she is quickly inhabited by her fit of hysteria, expressing sexual gyrations through fiercely uncontrolled bodily movements, where her physical contortions resemble the paranormal visits to Barbara Hershey in The Entity (1982).  Charcot hopes to release the disease’s hold over the patient’s otherwise unexplained partial paralysis by simulating the condition, hoping she will simply snap out of it.  The presentation is a bit grotesque, a room filled with men holding invincible, seemingly God-like power over this defenseless woman, yet the men burst into sudden applause afterwords, obviously very pleased with themselves and lauding Charcot’s medical advancement, which produces little more than mere hope, as the paralysis remains.  Interestingly, over time, Augustine’s condition improves on its own, each time after a highly traumatic event, actually producing the effect the doctor was hoping for, but without a prestigious audience around to see it.  Charcot’s ethics are compromised when he sees signs of improvement, but chooses to ignore them during the most important event in his life, where he’s gathered the most influential team of academics and physicians in France. His career on the line and the funding of his neurology program at the hospital at stake, personal ambition takes precedence over everything else.  While all eyes are on him as well, the sleight of hand theatrical nature of hypnotically induced sexual hysteria has the power to persuade men’s souls.  Though she’s been an uneducated, culturally repressed, lower class woman, never given the time of day, Augustine is suddenly jettisoned into the spotlight, where these exhibitions have conditioned her to understand the power she holds over men, for the first time taking control over her own sexuality.  While the music is by Jocelyn Pook, who also scored Stanley Kubrick’s final film EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), the extraordinary finale is a building crescendo, set to the extravagantly transcendent music of Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ARVO PÄRT - Cantus in memory of... (4:59), which in this film is nothing less than a liberating walk to freedom.