Both Sides of the Blade

  In this brilliant romantic tragedy a solid woman Sara (Juliette Binoche) is torn between her committed lover Jean (Vincent Lindon) and her wild former passion Francois (Gregoire Colin). 

The film opens on Sara’s idyllic seaside holiday with Jean and ends with her left alone, a victim of her own emotions, her lover’s selfishness and — as if all that were not enough — mischance. A lifetime of womanly obedience ends in dashed loves and a dark solitude.

The scenes of intimacy and conflict stand up to anything in Bergman.  The predominantly low string score tightens the lovers’ tension throughout.

As this is a Claire Denis film the romantic plot is given a political correlative. As one of Sara’s radio interviewees cites Fritz Fanon, racism is a psychological problem because it is rooted in people being locked-in in their identities. So here are the three central lovers. When Francois resurfaces as Jean’s business partner and Sara’s disaster, she tries to negotiate between her two lovers. She is ultimately betrayed by one man and her own compulsiveness. 

The political theme also involves 15-year-old Marcus, Jean’s black son from his marriage to a Martinique woman. Jean tries to save the despairing teen from letting himself be defined by the dominant white society and resigned to servitude. That’s Sara’s struggle too. The epilogue is a pallid, lifeless scene of Jean and Marcus at a juvenile rugby practice, their spirit lost.    

        The title? It's those damned locked-in identities. If you're not cut from the outside you do it within.

        Claire Denis has had an astonishing year. She has made two world-class films, this and Stars at Noon (see my posting). In both she balances the personal and the political. Both have remarkably explicit sex scenes, always with a point both psychological and political. The performances, scripts and cinematics are uniformly brilliant/