Through a couple who tears, Claire Denis explores the feeling of love.
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The film opens at the end of the world. Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon) swim side by side like dolphins, smile with bubbles in the nostrils and cross the waves of their holidays hand in hand. In this turquoise lagoon, they love each other as a snapshot. Change of atmosphere. The sun rushes into a long tunnel which leads them straight to the threshold of their Parisian apartment. Sara and Jean may pick up the mail by chatting, adjust the blind by getting stuck, make love by looking at each other, something rumbles. The heavy and compact music that has not left them since their nuptial bath leads them, for sure, towards violence.
She appears the next morning in a parking lot. Sara crosses François (Grégoire Colin), a former lover who is also an old friend and trading partner of Jean. It was enough for that, two parking spaces not too far away, to wake up in Sara the fear lurking in it, the beating heart, the blood push with the wrist … as in the novel of Christine Angot a turning point of life (Flammarion , 2018) whose film is freely inspired, she says: “Here, it is again.”
Who counts now? The man of the Bahamas or that of the parking lot? Who is the official? Who is the lover? Which of the two is his great love? These questions relating to adultery are quickly evacuated, to remove the film from all the bourgeois conventions of conjugality, in one of his most beautiful sequences: John suspects Sara to deceive him. She intimate to him to let her speak: “You do not understand that a sentence is a breath? Each time you question me, I have to take everything back, from the start because I take my breath, the breath of my sentence … “
Sompets of tension
If we recognize the stubborn phrasing of the Coscenarist Christine Angot, of which it is the second collaboration with Claire Denis after a beautiful inner sun (2017), we must also read the movement of a film which refuses that ‘We cut him off. By completing places, emotions and discussions as disparate as a lagoon and a tunnel, each long musical beach clings to the devastating and unpredictable impulse of Sara without giving in to the dilemma of the love triangle which, by definition, asks a rationalization of desires and a development of sentences.
After an opening that let fear the worst in allegorical terms, with love and relentlessness unfolds in an increasingly clear demonstration of the perseverance of the feeling in love in what is most versatile. If we sometimes reach peaks of tension (big arguments, deep sighs, crocodile tears and abandoned actors at their melodramatic reach), the film is also sufficiently dense to let the relations of domination which are exerted between the three protagonists. The few biographical elements of men are enough to get an idea: François is a sportsman, instigator of projects. Jean, a former rugby player recently released from prison, is unemployed. His only authority is painfully exercised with his Métis Son to whom he orders to study to get out of the rut of racist thought dug by the elders. Like the teenager, we would have preferred something more subtle.
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