‘Both Sides of the Blade’ Film Review: Claire Denis’ Latest Will Feel Sharper for Longtime Fans
thewrap.comare meant to live in the real world. The icy lens of cinematographer Eric Gautier (“Ash Is Purest White’) ensures that Jean and Sara do not embody the Paris of your dreams but of their mundane routines.
They have to remember to carry their COVID-era masks everywhere, and it’s usually rainy or gray as Sara heads to her radio job interviewing guests on a range of social ills.
There are no bright and shiny days for Jean, either, when his mysterious past keeps blocking his unformed present. Or, for that matter, when he occasionally visits Marcus, whose mother is Black and who wants no part of his white, absentee father’s lectures on ignoring racism.This tension between Denis’ cinematic imagination and the characters’ quotidian lives winds up feeling less nervy than frustrating.
Marcus seems too often like an afterthought not only to Jean but also the movie itself. Sara’s emotional impulsivity becomes increasingly less believable, and neither man is either the hero or the villain that might inspire her unlikely choices.Still, Binoche is reliably excellent, even when Sara herself is unconvincingly capricious.
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