RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2022

Fire

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER, NEW YORK, NY
MARCH 3-13, 2022

Review by Drake Stutesman

FIRE
Director: Claire Denis
2022
France
116 minutes

The Opening Night film for Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Claire Denis’s Fire (also known by the title Both Sides of the Blade) focuses on a story of lovers and sex and the drives that explode between people. The story is about a middle-aged couple who begin to fall apart, but it exposes much more than that obvious breakdown. Fire exposes the inexpressible imbalances and balances that motivate a person. The woman, Sara (subtly played by Juliette Binoche), living in a still amorous relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon) after ten years, suddenly meets an old lover, François (Grégoire Colin) and hungers for a new affair with him. Denis brings forth the physicality of sex in her attention to lovemaking and she imbues this with a reality that is welcome to the screen. The film, however, utilizes lovemaking and longing to convey an understory - the inexplicable space and silence that is deep within how people contact one another. Denis makes this understory as upfront as the breakup story. The relationships are shown as ever fragmented and the film constantly shows them as more fragmented, but though these problems are fueled by intense feelings - rage, jealousy, desire, disappointment - the film projects a feeling that what people feel sure of, or think they do, is as elementally a delusion or a fantasy as what is real, and this is an undeniable part of many emotions. The characters (including the Sara's son and his grandmother), somehow don't fit into each other’s spaces, and the film opens this discomfort to be the part of the oddness of loving someone. This ambitious perspective is one that Denis brings to many of her films. She is deft at bringing out not what is said but what isn't said or, more so, can't be said. She aims, often, at the living chaotic “unspoken” and she poses it as both grounded and ingrained in the everyday of everyday lives.

Must see. Claire Denis's unusual take on the real ways in which people try to love themselves and each other.