Avec amour et acharnement [Both Sides of the Blade] (Claire Denis, 2022)

[therewillbeblus]

Avec amour et acharnement is one of the most abrasively alienating films about alienation I've ever seen. It's a film about a milieu rotting from miscommunication, the secrets and lies we construct instinctively as a default. Even the lovely grandmother tells baldfaced lies to her son without a blink, those which have no significant rationale, respectfully de-emphasized by Denis to implicitly define them as part of her characters' expected worlds. Binoche's radio guests speak of "existential violence" born from our commitment to ignorance regarding the deeply-engrained segregating behaviors that we propagate. People in traffic yell at one another, ex-lovers don't understand limits of their longterm partners, an abandoned child isn't seen- even by those who are with him- until the end.

The film's' grammar is fragmented in strange edits, swings that pendulum from withholdings of principals' 'action' to an intrusive suffocation of faces begging to be invited into the life of their partner to no avail, just as the characters either avoid all opportunities to open up or overshare in futile attempts to provoke connection. It's an anti-narrative film, a romance without intimacy that plays out like a crime film without suspense, but more than anything this is a 50s melodrama disemboweled to unexpectedly hide from its angst rather than shout about it. Denis provides a circumferential route to involve the audience by excluding and frustrating us in a manner that mirrors the central characters' exclusion and frustration from one another and themselves. The mood is indebted to Antonioni to be sure, but far more perverse (if not nearly as effective) for removing the attentive focus on emotion signifying character and replacing this method with a vacuum that exhibits only what's lacking, empty, imprisoned, disengaging us from any sense of 'character'. Lindon's bootstraps-heavy "inspirational speech" is as far as we get towards accessing a defined truth behind anyone, but even that functions as a revelation that individualism is just as tragically paralyzing as the complacency he's ranting against.

The camerawork and erratically-implemented score destabilizes us, and the film's crowning moment- when Binoche takes ominous calls from both her current beau and her ex as she looks up at "the agency" waiting to be invited in- is discomforting and surreal in a way only Lynch has been able to communicate with such sincere urgency before now. This scene is so profound, unsettling, and confounding that it frames the entire film as a thriller of emotional neglect, a meditation on hopeless loneliness, and a tone poem about toxic psychosocial barriers fatalistically preventing us from achieving intimacy. Binoche tells a story early on that spells out the film's thesis: we're all dying for attachment, and while my friend tended to point his sympathy towards one of the leads in particular, that person's inaccessibility- especially pertaining to what their actions 'promised' in that memory- is just as influential to infecting a collectivist potential as other characters' more outwardly immoral behavior. This is a painful, agonizing, achingly brilliant film that is so intentionally repugnant that I never want to see it again. Also, for a film about 'romances' it's probably the least romantic movie I've ever seen, though that's undoubtedly the point!

[hearthesilence]

I forgot that Both Sides of the Blade was listed as Fire when it premiered at Lincoln Center earlier this year as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. During at least one of her discussions, she emphatically stated that Fire was NOT the title and that she was trying to convince IFC to change it to what is now its current title. She did mention that the original French title did not translate well into English, and for some reason, I thought she said it was more or less “fire and ice” - that's not the case (it’s actually “with love and fury”), but it feels like it could have been. To me at least, there's a strong dichotomy in how the two central characters are navigating their lives: desire as defined by impulse, irrationality and pure emotion, or the coolness of reasoning, rationalizing, intellect and calculation. This is actually how they are responding to their past - one says she’s trapped by it (and arguably trapped by her emotions and impulses) and one seems to adhere to a disciplined ethos of not looking back. What Denis does within that framework is a lot to digest, but I think it’s brilliant - I don’t know whether to call it one of her great films, but at minimum it’s rich, complex and incredibly nuanced.

It also made the mixed, polarized responses to this film pretty bewildering. Jordan Hoffman’s review for the A.V. Club is flat out clueless, which I don’t feel bad saying because it also reeks of arrogance. That’s probably the worst of them, but so many of the reviews feel massively disappointing in how they read the film. Even a positive one offers a pretty glib and shallow assessment of the ending…

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it only offers the observation that Sara (Binoche) should have backed up her phone, but there’s nothing in the review to suggest that the critic saw the real significance of what’s happened. This woman, unlike her husband, cannot escape the past and surrenders to it, destroying her marriage in the process. With one accidental bump, fate has erased it for her, even her means of contacting her old flame - it’s symbolic, but it could very well be the thing she needed to finally escape her past too, even though it’s too late.

A.O. Scott criticizes the talk Jean (Lindon) gives to his son, dismissing it for failing to engage with contemporary reality. It certainly hits a pretty big subject that isn’t central to the film’s story, but personally I liked how it was weaved in. It starts with Jean telling his son that he's in control of his own destiny and that he shouldn't believe from the get-go that he is already defined by the popular view of what happens to minorities like him. But as he’s saying this, it already brings to mind an earlier scene where Jean explains to Sara that he can’t coast on his past as a rugby player, that he’s now an ex-con, and that he has to take a risky opportunity with her old flame to re-invent himself. By his delivery, it’s clear that he believes he is indeed defined as an ex-con and needs to escape it. Because of that earlier scene, everything Jean's saying to his son covers up the fact that he fears his son really is defined by those terms and doomed to be like too many others railroaded by society - this seems to come out at the tail end when his son again tells him that he wants to go into retail, and his father tells him how that will play out if he does indeed pursue it.

It’s just one scene, but it’s an example of how a lot of this film feels incredibly layered and nuanced in its ideas, and Denis does a fine job at building the emotional stakes for all of them.

[therewillbeblus]

I forgot that Both Sides of the Blade was listed as Fire when it premiered at Lincoln Center earlier this year as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. During at least one of her discussions, she emphatically stated that Fire was NOT the title and that she was trying to convince IFC to change it to what is now its current title. She did mention that the original French title did not translate well into English, and for some reason, I thought she said it was more or less “fire and ice” - that's not the case (it’s actually “with love and fury”), but it feels like it could have been. To me at least, there's a strong dichotomy in how the two central characters are navigating their lives: desire as defined by impulse, irrationality and pure emotion, or the coolness of reasoning, rationalizing, intellect and calculation. This is actually how they are responding to their past - one says she’s trapped by it (and arguably trapped by her emotions and impulses) and one seems to adhere to a disciplined ethos of not looking back. What Denis does within that framework is a lot to digest, but I think it’s brilliant - I don’t know whether to call it one of her great films, but at minimum it’s rich, complex and incredibly nuanced.

I really liked this too, and the more I think about it, the more I believe it's one of Denis' richest works and destined to be her most underrated. Lindon's speech to his son has lots of value, and that critic's dismissal is misjudging one of the key moments to understanding the film. I already expressed my thoughts in her dedicated thread.

[senseabove]

I, on the other hand, thought it the worst of the dozen Denis features I've seen by a very long ways, a ham-fisted lunge at interpersonal complexity and forced discomfort for the sake of it, and utterly devoid of the finely textured and embodied emotional layering that distinguishes Denis in her best form.

[Black Hat]

I too thought this was her worst film. Two severely unlikeable characters that I think Denis doesn't realize are living in a bourgeois universe that's barely tolerable to witness with 20 somethings let alone people in their 60s. Gregoire Colin sort of does an impression of his 35 Shots of Rum character but, he was pointless, charmless, and just so sad to watch. I have zero patience for this kind of self-indulgent drivel, but it was jarring to think that perhaps one of my favorite filmmakers, mainly because of her humanity, is now, out of touch (everything with the kid reeked).

[Matt]

I loved it. If 35 Rhums was her Ozu tribute, I could see this being her Naruse tribute: the weight of family obligations, the intrusion of money into every crevice of human activity, the tragic inability of humans to communicate their needs and desires to each other, and of course the phenomenal central performance of a woman who

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wants it all but ends up, probably, with nothing.

If Denis can be said to be back in her genre film mode, this is her Sirkian melodrama (after the dystopian sci-fi of High Life and the romantic comedy of Un beau soleil… and before the steamy international political thriller (Graham Greene by way of The Year of Living Dangerously or Against All Odds).

It’s definitely abrasive, particularly in its restless handheld widescreen closeups, its cold digital video look, and its aggressive cutting (it’s like she asked Eric Gautier to be the anti-Agnes Godard), but still far more accessible than something like Bastards. I don’t think they’ve been ecstatically embraced by fans of the more narratively and emotionally evasive Denis films, but I’m all for more Denis-Binoche-Christine Angot collabs about middle aged people acting recklessly for love.

[reaky]

This is up there with the great relationship-argument films (with Le Mépris and Scenes from a Marriage). Denis doesn’t stint on the bathetic nature of such squabbles, foregrounding their circular, self-contradicting, self-justifying nonsense and supposedly dramatic flourishes like withdrawing to sit on a toilet and defiantly sulk, and bellowed injunctions like “Stop bobbing!”

The shots of Parisian rooftops, the Tindersticks score and the reappearance of Vincent Lindon give this the feel of a sour sequel to the ecstatic Vendredi Soir.