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      ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ Review: Who Do You Love?

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      In the latest film from Claire Denis, Juliette Binoche plays a Parisian radio journalist in a romantic quandary.When we first meet Sara and Jean, they are enjoying a vacation. To be precise, they‘re making out in the waters of a sun-dappled lagoon, the very picture of midlife romantic fulfillment. The fact that Sara and Jean are played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, two of most charismatic actors of a certain age in modern cinema, makes their apparent bliss look all the more enviable.But the pictures only tell part of the story. The couple’s smiles and caresses are accompanied by brooding, cello-heavy music — the kind that lets even the most inattentive or tone-deaf viewer know that something bad is going to happen. Even when the sound brightens and Jean and Sara return to their tidy Paris apartment, you can’t quite shake the feeling of dread.“Both Sides of the Blade” is a Claire Denis movie, which is to say that it can be expected to confound expectations, including those it seems to set up for itself. Sex, politics, vampires, science fiction, Herman Melville — nothing is alien to this restless and resourceful filmmaker.Here, the plot occasionally gravitates toward romantic comedy, as Sara finds herself torn between Jean and François (Grégoire Colin), a former lover who is also an old friend and potential business partner of Jean’s. But the mood hovers in the neighborhood of melodrama, thriller, even horror. Sara’s passion for François seems almost like a form of possession, and allusions to Jean’s status as an ex-convict contribute to a free-floating sense of danger.The dissonance between the film’s structure and its tone is potentially interesting, and the off-balance intensity of the performances means that “Both Sides of the Blade” is never dull. As they did in “Let the Sunshine In,” Binoche and Denis trace the disruptive effects of desire on a woman who is neither heroine nor victim. The impulses that lead Sara to destabilize her own domestic life are mysterious even to her, and the audience may wonder why she appears to prefer François, who is pouty and petulant (even in bed), to the stoical, sad-eyed Jean.Bad choices often make good stories, but there is something thin and tentative about this one, which Denis wrote with Christine Angot. Sara is the host of a public-affairs radio broadcast, a job that allows the film to glance occasionally at the wider world. Guests talk about the crisis in Lebanon and the pervasiveness of racism in Western society, and their presence in the movie is a puzzle. Maybe we are supposed to see that Sara cares about such matters, or that Denis does, or to be reminded that we should. Or maybe Denis is pointing out the gulf between public concerns and private experience.The larger problem is that the main characters and their situation seem weightless, their nonromantic lives sketched in hastily and without much conviction. Jean sometimes travels to the suburbs to visit his mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier), who is caring for his teenage son, Marcus (Issa Perica). The young man, whose mother is out of the picture, is biracial, and becomes a too-convenient symbol for social problems the film otherwise ignores. He steals Nelly’s credit card and does badly in school, and because we know almost nothing else about him as a character, he seems like a stereotype.Marcus’s behavior provokes a rant from his father against “the prevailing discourse” that emphasizes identity over individuality. Like the segments from Sara’s radio program, this diatribe against le wokisme waves in the direction of contemporary reality without engaging it.Meanwhile, the Sara-Jean-François love triangle, as it grows louder and more tearful, loses momentum as a source of drama. Its resolution is — and I mean this as a literal description — a bad joke. How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.Both Sides of the BladeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

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      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Who You Think I Am’ Review: A Woman of Feeling, in Bed and Out

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      Juliette Binoche plays an academic with a turbulent inner life that makes her complicated romantic life all the more difficult.Juliette Binoche moves through the French drama “Who You Think I Am” as if possessed. From moment to moment, her character — an academic with a turbulent inner life — looks tense or wildly happy. Emotion, by turns, lightens and darkens her translucent face, and changes her body, gait and gestures. She laughs, she cries, expands, contracts. At times, she all but floats down the street, buoyed by the love of a younger man. Then again, she may be less high on him, per se, than on how he makes her feel.Filmmakers can get a lot of mileage just by filling the screen with Binoche’s face, which is often a movie’s greatest special effect. It’s a lovely face, eternally so, yet while beauty tends to pull us in, it doesn’t necessarily hold and bewitch us, keeping us hooked. But Binoche is a virtuoso of sentiment, with a mesmerizing control of her face. She can soften, harden or crumple it into blotchy fragments, and then effortlessly piece it back together, with or without ragged seams. And while she’s a great weeper, more impressive is how these inundations, these eddies of feeling, move under her skin.You get to know Binoche’s character, Claire, through the modern-era version of the confessional box, a.k.a. a shrink’s office. She’s a mess, and a guy is to blame, or so it seems. What transpires proves more complex or at least complicated. There are two guys, Claire tells her new therapist (Nicole Garcia), both perfectly coifed and readily undressed. When the first (Guillaume Gouix), dumped her, Claire reveals, she turned to the modern-era version of the devil, a.k.a. social media, to spy on him. With a seductive photo and a fake identity, Claire transformed into the much younger Clara, sneaking into his life and then into that of the conveniently situated lover No. 2 (François Civil).There are twists and turns, some obvious, others preposterous. Characters come and go (Charles Berling pops in too briefly as Claire’s ex-husband), and time slips away as Claire giggles, glows, musses her hair and loses her bearings. Throughout, there are gestures toward larger issues, including desire, beauty, gender and age. There’s a lot of talking, some dancing and more talking, this being a French movie. In one funny, pointed scene, Claire drives in circles frantically talking to a lover on her cell while her puzzled, exasperated sons watch, waiting to be picked up. Binoche seems to be having a good time, but her character could have benefited from fewer tears and histrionics.Binoche nevertheless fluidly navigates all the narrative switchbacks and emotional storms, enough that you may not mind the pileup of strained developments and coincidences. (You may, however, snort at an expedient car accident, but only because it’s such a howler of a cliché.) You realize all too soon that Claire has a way of making things — life, love — more complicated than need be. Then again, as cutaways to her lecturing in a university classroom remind you, she does teach novels of intrigue and deception like “Dangerous Liaisons.” Given this particular movie, she presumably also lectures on “Cyrano de Bergerac” and topics like the dissimulating heroine.It’s understandable that the director Safy Nebbou, who shares script credit with Julie Peyr, keeps his focus and camera so relentlessly on Claire. (The movie is adapted from a novel by Camille Laurens.) Yet because much of the rest of the story is so underdeveloped — notably Claire’s intimate life with her frustratingly generic children — the character overwhelms everything, including the fragile realism. Some of this is obviously intentional: Claire relates swathes of the movie in the therapist’s office, so it’s all about her. Yet while Claire’s therapist (or rather Garcia) turns out to be an ideal audience, the kind of transference that makes movies work never happens.Who You Think I AmNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More