In Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade, Sara (Juliette Binoche) is an ex-girlfriend of her husband Jean's (Vincent Lindon) one-time friend, François (Grégoire Colin). He exists as a dormant piece of the past in the quiet intersection of the couple’s love. As in all good tales about marriage, there are two sides to their story. In a stable, loving relationship, the story's two-sidedness is harmless, but in an unstable partnership, that two-sidedness can be decisive—a double-edged blade. As long as its edge remains dull, its existence doesn't make any difference, but it has the potential to threateningly, suddenly sharpen. Sara and Jean go on vacation; they swim; they say sweet things to one another; they embrace with genuine affection in the morning. It's only when Sara sees François—who then recruits Jean for his new business—that a renewed awareness of his existence disturbs the peace of the oblivious.
Throughout her career, Denis has developed a particular approach to capturing, in moving images, the way a character's inner life can set off a chain of real consequences by implication. In Beau travail (1999), the simmering sexual tension between Galoup (Denis Lavant) and Sentain (also Colin) is implied rather than surfaced, and the propulsion of the narrative emerges precisely from the effort to keep it hidden. With Both Sides of the Blade, Denis brings the question into the domestic realm: at what cost do suppressed feelings emerge? To whose benefit, and to whose fault? Here, a love triangle becomes increasingly perilous, putting the viewer at the edge of her seat. Whereas for Galoup, the struggle to suppress emotion ultimately leads to violence, for Sara and Jean the suppression is not the difficulty. In fact, suppression is the lifeline: it's the rhythm of domestic existence, of grocery shopping and wearing your husband's shirt, the knowing looks and smiles that suggest the sacrifice that has led them here, letting the old complications rest forgotten. It's in the inescapable emergence of these tensions—the bursting of the domestic bubble—that the difficulty lies.
For Sara and Jean, the peaceful balance of their relationship begins to tip when, lying in bed after seeing François, Sara recounts the birth of her feelings for Jean. Coming home from a party sharing a taxi with both men, Jean announced he would go home with his then-wife while François decided to stay out, leaving Sara to go home alone. She'd asked herself why she was with the guy who left, and not with the one who stayed. Sara's memory of the moment creates a fissure: Jean is made uncomfortable by it, irritated, as if the reminder of their relationship being predicated on their mutual acquaintance with François is a stain that Sara inappropriately perceives as sweet. Until then, their bed had been the site only of adoration and domestic contentment. Their apartment offered a respite from the demands of Sara's radio job, of Jean's responsibilities to his family, his son Marcus (Issa Perica) and his mother Nelly (Bulle Ogier). Jean's murky past as an ex-con, which is hinted at but never fully explained, adds to the air of moral transgression that threatens to completely throw the balance off, if only it would emerge. In accepting François' suggestion that they partner up to open a recruiting agency for young rugby talent (before going to prison, Jean had been a rugby player), Jean and François deal with each other only at night. This shadowy approach to business, though not explicitly illegal, opens up a different kind of permissiveness: a threat of danger, embodied by François, permeates the domestic idyll.
The balcony in Jean and Sara's apartment—notably, a space that can't be conclusively categorized as inside or outside—is the crucial terrain on which the couple's separate relationships with François take hold. Talking with François at night and often on the balcony, where Sara can't hear them, Jean's business dealings cross the border of the couple's sheltered, private world. The outside seeps in despite itself; similarly, in the middle of the crisis, Marcus must be attended to, his own transgressions—failing school, neglecting to heed to his grandmother's authority, who has custody of him—dutifully addressed. Stretching the tear in the fabric of the couple's shelter is the real world, the one that exists outside of the film and finds its way in nevertheless: the pandemic is in full swing; the crisis in Lebanon is a topic on Sara's radio show. The presence of these issues points to the ominous impossibility of fully sheltering oneself from outside influence. Even though the pandemic doesn't seem to particularly impact the couple's daily activity, it's still part of their life: walking out the door, they grab a mask; talking on the phone with his mother, Jean lets it dangle from one ear.
In a Denis film, the relationship between the internal and external is often precarious: the characters' environments often oppose their state of mind, illustrating how fraught their inner worlds are. In White Material (2009), Maria Vial's (Isabelle Huppert) idea of her coffee plantation is at immediate odds with its objective reality; the turquoise water and fine white sand that surround Galoup and his unit in Beau travail turn out to be nearly lethal. Here, an increasingly fragmented and dissociated world is the background to intimate relationships that become so tight, they're suffocating. Marcus brushes off his grandmother's constant demands; Sara and Jean's apartment, once their refuge, becomes claustrophobic. This approach is characteristically Denisian: the conservative existence of borders, whether they are emotional or material, doesn't make them incontestable. The conflict between the couple culminates in the shattering of the illusion of protected containment. François waits for Jean on the balcony, and Jean and Sara must finally express to each other everything that they had worked for a decade to suppress.
The pacing of Both Sides can sometimes feel awkward in its withholding and releasing of tension to a somewhat erratic rhythm. The characters' emotional conflicts often seem to converge on a single, crowded plane of feeling: the frustration of Jean's relationship with Marcus, for example, seems at times indistinguishable in focus from his marital crisis. "Marcus is my business, too," Sara pleads with Jean early on to no avail. The two defining relationships in Jean's life—to his wife and to his son—are kept at a distance from one another, but they suffer from the same permeability that makes Jean feel out of control. Nelly's presence, much like François', feels both indispensable and unbearable. Perhaps it is precisely this airlessness—this inability to accord different focus to different emotional crises—which creates the relentless pressure that drives the film forward. This pressure strikes a raw nerve: the boundaries between the internal and the external come undone, the environments that surround the characters grow unable to sustain their inner workings. As such, Jean throws a table; Sara glides down a wall onto the floor; Marcus flees his grandmother's house.
Jean doesn't wait until evidence reveals itself to confront Sara about her infidelity: he calls it before he can even see it, powerless to stop it but not to articulate his position with rising anger. Sara is the one in denial, insisting that she has done nothing wrong—and not untruthfully, at least not yet. The moment of the confrontation is the most captivating sequence in Both Sides, so intense as to be breathtaking: trying to defend herself, Sara asks for room to take a breath. "There's a breath to sentences," she insists, puffing in hyperbolic exhales, trying to make her point. Sara's acknowledgment of the argument's claustrophobia captures well the upturned atmosphere that surrounds the couple: if before their committed togetherness was cozy, their apartment a place of refuge, now this same closeness is suffocating, unbearable, begging for air. The intensity of this reversal is what makes their argument compulsively watchable—the suppression of all that came before had been so effective that this final turn away from love and toward hatred is so complete as to be irreversible. Every aspect of the lives they shared up to this point doesn't count; everything is laid out on the table, up for grabs, in a hellish, indefatigable argument.
Particularly in the moments when Sara, Jean, and François are all in the same vicinity, there is an atmosphere of danger to Both Sides that approximates the mood of an erotic thriller. At an inauguration party for the scouting offices, François and Sara reunite for the first time since separating; François' touch to Sara's waist, her grip on his shirt, and the camera that closes in on the millimeters of air between them all evoke the suspense of violence. Still, the limitation of a genre label doesn't completely suit the breadth of Denis' effort. By bringing many of the staples of her approach to bear on a domestic drama, the film asks larger questions about which realities we're willing to sacrifice for the sake of an illusory shared one. Her outlook isn't the most optimistic—but it's striking in the way it draws, in broad and assertive strokes, the mess of life. That's what makes the viewer so uneasy.