Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction. Denis has co-written the screenplay with the author Christine Angot, with whom she wrote her previous movie Let the Sunshine In, and this has the same novelistic feel. The original French title is Feu, ou Avec Amour et Acharnement (which translates as Fire, or With Love And Fury); the English subtitle comes from a Tindersticks’ track composed especially for this film about the lacerating agony of an impossible choice: (“I’m sliding down both sides of the blade”).
The three combatants are heavyweights of French cinema. Juliette Binoche is Sara, a presenter on a highbrow Paris radio talk show, who for 10 years has lived with Jean (played by the smoulderingly rumpled Vincent Lindon); he is a former sports star, retired through injury, who has served time in prison for an unspecified offence and now is apparently denied a credit card and so deals in cash. Jean has a teen son, Marcus (Issa Perica) whose mother now lives abroad and who is being raised by Jean’s mother Nelly (Bulle Ogier). The third corner of the triangle is François (Grégoire Colin), Sara’s ex-lover whom she left for Jean on a passionate impulse a decade ago. Jean and Sara haven’t seen François since then, but one morning outside the studio, Sara glimpses François in the street and all her old feelings are devastatingly reignited. Did he see her, too? It’s not clear, but maybe it’s not a coincidence that he contacts Jean trying to get his help with a sports agency he is setting up.
