Both Sides of the Blade (Claire Denis, 2022) (Patreon)

This is an extremely difficult film to evaluate. I will state for the record that I did not enjoy watching it, although enjoyment is of course only one reaction that a work of art can provoke. What makes Both Sides of the Blade so confusing is that its dominant formal features make it, to my mind, a failure as a film. But I suspect that they may have been fully intentional strategies on Claire Denis' part, designed to frustrate narrative desire and thwart our ability to identify with the film's main protagonists. And while intention does not equal achievement per se -- many films try things and fail, or succeed in doing things that were not especially worth doing -- it would at least partly explain just what it was I watched.

Ostensibly a midlife love-triangle drama, Both Sides of the Blade is less a film than the sketchy outline of a film, where elements such as "motivation," "history," or "human connection" are blocked out but not filled in. It's not that these things don't matter in Denis' film. Rather, their absence is palpable. Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon) have been together for ten years. Jean is suddenly contacted by his old friend Francois Grégoire Colin) with a business opportunity. But Francois is Sara's ex-husband, and his re-entry into her life stirs unresolved feelings. That much is clear.

What is not clear is how any of this is actually transpiring, or why it matters so damn much. Sara, a talk-radio host, happens to see Francois from a distance while heading into work. Based on the sweeping music sting by Denis' ever-present Tindersticks, we can tell that Sara seeing her old flame is overwhelming, but we learn next to nothing about their past, what was so volatile about their relationship, or why she is thrown into such emotional disarray. Then again, what we see of Sara's marriage to Jean is similarly mysterious and context-free. Apart from the opening scene, which shows Jean and Sara swimming in the ocean and adoring one another, everything else we see is neither loving nor resentful or even particularly routinized. It's mechanical, as if Denis is keeping her psychosexual powder dry for the anguish and recriminations of the film's final half hour.

When Sara questions Jean about his new business deal with Francois, or when Jean asks how Sara feels now that her ex is back in her social orbit, both characters respond with a miasma of generalities. "Where are you going?" "You know where I'm going." "What do you want?" "I don't want anything," etc. Magnificent actors though they are, Binoche and Lindon cannot really sell this empty speech, and given Eric Gauthier's lackluster cinematography -- mostly handheld close-ups drawing us into the spaces where acting ought to be -- there's not a lot of visual interest either.

The net result is an uncanny portrait of a woman's desire torn between two men, with the past coming back to unsettle the present. But there is next to no context for Sara's internal conflict. The effect of this is interesting at times, since Sara's indiscretions, layered with an almost noirish turn in the otherwise anodyne score, give the sense that Sara's betrayal is an active crime, that her carnal attraction to a man who is not her husband is both inexorable and unforgivable. Denis is certainly placing female sexual desire front and center, while also emphasizing the atypicality, the cinematic oddness, of doing so.

But what does it all mean? The sketchy narrative construction gives us few reasons to really feel the weight of this crisis, and Denis doesn't compensate with assertive formalism. Then again, the romantic plot is rendered with Tolstoy-level exactitude compared to the various subplots of Both Sides. We know Jean went to prison for nearly a decade, but never learn why. While he was incarcerated, his son by a previous union, Marcus (Issa Perica) has been raised by Jean's mother (Bulle Ogier), and he is starting to get into trouble. Even Sara's radio show, featuring various writers and thinkers discoursing on random topics, offers no coherence. It's as though Both Sides of the Blade is a perverse experiment to see what some of the finest actors in the world could do with a couple of Post-It notes in lieu of a script. It's just weird.