117 min | NR | July 8, 2022 | IFC Films
A long marriage holds steady until the ex who introduced the couple comes back into their orbit. Sara wants Jean, then wants François, then wants both, and watches the whole thing burn down around her. Desire here is not romance. It is a demolition.
Sara and Jean live in a Paris apartment and a settled love that has lasted years. The film opens on them in the sea, tangled and happy, and then drops them back into a city where Jean is rebuilding a life after prison. Sara spots François on a street and her body reacts before her mind does. François is the man who first paired her with Jean and the man Jean now needs for work. Claire Denis builds the film around a simple, brutal premise. Desire arrives without permission and obeys no one.
Juliette Binoche plays Sara as a woman who narrates her own honesty while lying with every choice. She does a radio job that requires composed empathy and then comes home and detonates. Binoche lets the contradiction sit on her face. Vincent Lindon plays Jean with a coiled physical stillness that reads as decency and then curdles into menace. He is a big man trying to make himself smaller for a life that keeps shrinking. Grégoire Colin plays François as a near-absence, a man who pulls people toward him by offering nothing.
Denis and her co-writer Christine Angot adapt Angot’s novel into a film that lives in close quarters and refuses release. Cinematographer Éric Gautier shoots faces in tight handheld frames that crowd the actors and deny the audience air. The camera holds on Binoche through long arguments and stays past the point of comfort. Tindersticks score the film with a low murmur that swells under the silences instead of the shouting. The sound design treats the apartment as a trap with thin walls.
This is a chamber piece about two people who cannot stop talking themselves into ruin. The film locks the door on the love triangle and lets the same fight recur with rising heat. Denis trusts the audience to sit inside the repetition and feel it as the texture of a collapsing marriage. The approach turns claustrophobic before the end, and the talk circles where it could cut deeper. What lands is the refusal to assign blame. Sara and Jean are not victims of each other. They are victims of wanting.