Within the palms of a real artist, even probably the most melodramatic state of affairs can really feel profound. There’s little within the narrative that Claire Denis has concocted with supply novelist Christine Angot to differentiate it from dozens of different French research of disintegrating bourgeois romances. However such is the finesse and acuity of Denis’s path that probably the most clichéd of occurrences tackle some provocative, psychological resonance.
There is not a cloud on the horizon within the opening sequence, as Sara and Jean share intimate moments in crystal clear coastal waters. The second they return to Paris, nevertheless, a greyness closes in and when François resurfaces, awakening long-suppressed emotions, the pair begin to pull aside bodily and emotionally. Sara had been courting him when she met Jean, who, in defending François, had been jailed in unexplained circumstances that had pushed a wedge between Jean and the son from his marriage to a Martinican lady.
Denis’s use of utmost close-ups that reinforce how indifferent Sara and Jean have turn into.
Denis and Angot (who had beforehand collaborated with Binoche on 2017’s Let the Sunshine In) limit François to the periphery, as Jean and Sara drift additional aside of their compact residence and maintain witnessing one another having furtive telephone conversations on the balcony. However whereas Eric Gautier’s stressed camerawork combines with the Tindersticks rating to create a stifling unease, it is Denis’s use of utmost close-ups that reinforce how indifferent Sara (who by no means actually stopped loving François) and Jean have turn into and the way trapped they’re in a state of affairs the manipulative François could or could not have intentionally devised.
This gnawing sense of doubt casts a Hitchcockian pall that considerably overshadows the political content material of Sara’s radio interviews and the continued issues of Marcus (Issa Perica) and grandmother Nelly (Bulle Ogier) within the suburbs. However such is the depth of Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon’s performances that they are all we’re actually all for.
