Claire Denis’s cinema is a poetry of seeing beyond what is said. Ostensibly about the sudden disintegration of a healthily erotic marriage between a middle-aged, upper-class couple, Both Sides of the Blade also features prominent allusions to the struggles of Francophone populations in former and current colonial spaces like Lebanon and the French Antilles. It’s as if both the serenity and the travails of Paris’s comfortable class were dependent in some way on an infrequently acknowledged past, one that’s not any less threatening to their blinkered way of life for only hanging around the margins.
The film’s approach to melodrama isn’t quite in the key of high camp, but its sharp deconstructive edge is difficult to miss—closer in tenor to Gone Girl than Caché. Sara (Juliette Binoche) is a Parisian radio host who seems blissfully happy in her marriage to Jean (Vincent London), a former rugby player. Denis introduces them as they fool around in the waters of an unidentified beach, the light glinting off the waves a seeming projection of their bliss. The too-good-to-be-true vibes continue through the cut to a slow pan of the Paris skyline and the romantic vista offered by the balcony of Sara and Jean’s apartment, with the far-off Sacre Coeur rising above the city’s top-floor landscape of bluish gray roofs and red chimneys.
Back in Paris, things aren’t so idyllic. It turns out that the sensitive Jean has been through the wringer in recent years, having served a stint in prison for an unspecified crime and losing custody of his teenage son, Marcus (Issa Perica), from a previous marriage. Now unemployed, he depends on Sara and his mother (Bulle Ogier), and there’s both empathy and a hint of parody to Denis’s portrayal of this large, hypermasculine man’s arrested development. He can’t even remember the right forms to bring to the unemployment office.
By itself, Jean’s struggle to fulfill a masculine ideal doesn’t cause much trouble, but then Sara happens to catch sight of François (Grégoire Colin), Jean’s close friend and former business partner, as well as Sara’s former lover. François has returned to Paris after some time away, and soon has apparently reached out to reinstate Jean to his old job. Jean is soon constantly working at recruiting rugby prospects, pacing around on the phone with François, staying out late on vague work assignments, and taking work trips of equally unspecified import. Sara, who insists that she’s fine with the reentry of François into their lives, is clearly not, and Binoche, aided by Denis’s emphatic close-ups, telegraphs the extreme distress of the prototypical heroine of a melodrama with every anguished line-reading and anxious glare.
The “melo” part of melodrama means music, and it’s a sense of feeling that Denis leans into throughout. She lays minor-key, strings-heavy score by Tindersticks on thick whenever François appears on screen or, it seems, even when his name is mentioned. But this patently—in fact, comically—obvious use of a leitmotif conflicts with the ambiguity of the nature of the chaos that François introduces to the story. Just why does Sara act traumatized by his mere sight? Is she worried about falling into an affair with the man, or is it Jean who’s being seduced by this unassuming-looking man? What exactly happened in this couple’s past?
The studied ambiguity of what’s going on here doesn’t keep the film from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller. There’s an unnerving sense of escalation even as it becomes clear that whatever happened between these three individuals is both more banal and more inaccessible than the viewer might expect. Equally mesmerizing, London and Binoche dart between sympathetic portrayals of people whose comfortable exterior hides the wounds of the past and hyperbolic replays of the standard love-triangle dramatic archetypes.
There’s a sense that the characters, particularly Sara, aren’t any more in touch with their personal histories, their real selves, than we are; their words don’t represent it any more sufficiently than the film’s images. And Denis turns this epistemological uncertainty into the subject of her melodrama—a genre otherwise obsessed with final, unambiguous revelations. Both Sides of the Blade isn’t the first film to use the form to deconstruct its own underlying logic. Its lineage certainly goes at least as far back as Douglas Sirk, with the implied queerness of the Jean-François business relationship even recalling Written on the Wind. Nevertheless, in coordinating the obvious codes of the melodrama with Denis’s propensity for enigma and irresolution, the film cuts with both sides of its blade.
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