Love in the time of Covid: "Both Sides of the Blade"

Claire Denis is another of our name directors caught looking backwards upon re-entry from lockdown. After the faltering interstellar exploration of 2018's High Life, Both Sides of the Blade marks a return both to terra firma and the kind of romantic runaround this writer-director came to master on her trajectory from 1996's Nénette and Boni via 2002's Vendredi Soir to 2017's Let the Sunshine In, once more reuniting with several of her preferred performers to fashion something intimate, close-up, manageable, a light stretch to get the blood flowing again after months in seclusion. Set aside the filmmaker's famously drifty, aerated house style, and you may be surprised at how closely Both Sides mirrors the love triangles that have formed the basis of French cinema since year zéro. We're introduced to a vision of bourgeois stability in Vincent Lindon and Juliette Binoche as a loved-up husband-and-wife returning home after a sun-drenched overseas stay. We get the destabilising episode: Binoche glimpsing old flame Grégoire Colin (here doing for cishetero marriage what he did for the esprit de corps of the Foreign Legion in 1999's Beau Travail) while commuting to her day job as a DJ at Radio France. And we sit back and await the fallout, which deviates from standard operating procedure by the fact the two men have a backstory of their own, something to do with sports and the Lindon character serving prison time, and thus a renewal of another fraught relationship. All of a sudden, everybody's competing for attention: Lindon also has a mother (Bulle Ogier), so overlooked she's become easy prey for credit-card scammers, as well as a teenage son by a previous marriage (Issa Perica), observed drifting into sullen delinquency.

In short, Both Sides gets more complicated as it goes along, and that lust for complication succeeds in keeping the conventional at bay for a substantial part of the running time. The Binoche character's day job allows Denis to fold in editorial on the crisis in Lebanon, and an interview with Lilian Thuram, the footballer-turned-race-relations-pundit; that the leads spend a notable number of their scenes masked positions the film as among the most illustrious records of a particular, fearful moment. One thing Denis plainly isn't afraid of is experience, be it harsh, sobering, instructive or otherwise. This camera hoovers up the everyday, breaking off from one conversation in a pharmacy to watch two drivers arguing the toss in the street, and rolling regardless as Lindon's attempts to reconnect with his son are temporarily drowned out by a neighbour's yapping dog. There's a real pleasure to be drawn from watching characters who scan (and behave) like actual adults rather than overgrown teenagers; it helps to make robust and involving drama out of what would likely have presented in English as an awkward muddle, as does another doomy Tindersticks score. (You increasingly feel you're watching not just the breakdown of a marriage, but the potential end of the world.) At its most potent, the film captures something of how Covid intensified everything, the already tricky business of human relations most of all: witness the mid-film sex scene, in a marital bedroom relit to resemble a morgue, which registers like an act of shared mourning for a relationship in its final throes.

Maybe the film could have done with a bit more of that intensification. At two hours, it can feel drawn out, with elements that aren't fully integrated. The Thuram interview is notable as the sort of pointed aside a smoother film in this vein wouldn't license, but also reads like a pre-emptive strike against the project's essential whiteness; the same goes for a bizarre scene that finds Lindon pacing back-and-forth mecsplaining The Discourse to his multiracial offspring. Denis, too, is seen to be working something through here, but her status surely means no-one's giving her notes on these scripts - and so, in both instances, Black lives matter for a minute before we resume the agonies of moneyed Caucasians. Still, there's also a lot that properly grips and fascinates, not least at a performance level. Denis continues to work well with Binoche, a relatively recent addition to her core ensemble, here offering a very persuasive description of a woman in knots, someone who can't bear the thought of seeing her ex, but equally can't bear not seeing him. I never believed Colin quite merited such fascination - the character's been conceived symbolically at best - but Lindon at least is typically rock-solid, oddly moving as a man who finds himself in the middle of a lot of unfinished business. And Denis makes the rooms as compelling as the people: it's such a great, simple effect to have the couple first reflected in, then divided by, the glass door separating living area from balcony. (At least one of them seems destined to end up out in the cold.) The pandemic, widely experienced through such shields and screens, left us never closer together as a species, and never further apart as individuals: that's at the centre of this complex, often confounding film, a comparatively middling entry in the Denis canon, but one that also serves as a major chronicle of its moment.

Both Sides of the Blade is now showing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.