Director: Claire Denis
Starring: Juliet Binoche, Vincent Lindon, Gregoire Colin, Bulle Ogier, and Issa Perica
Distributor: Other
Runtime: 116 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: Strong sex scenes

This subtitled French film tells the story of an ex-lover reappearing after a long absence which destabilises the relationship between the woman who loved him in the past, and the man she left him for.

This French romantic drama was written by the film’s director, Claire Denis and Christine Angot, and is based on the novel, Un tournant de la vie written in 2018 by Christine Angot. The movie was awarded the Silver Bear for Direction at the 72nd Berlin International Festival in 2022. The film appears under three titles: two of them are as noted above, and the third one is Fire, which is the movie-classification title that signals the strength of the interactions that the film depicts.

Sara (Binoche) and Jean (Lindon) are a middle-age couple, who have been married for a long time. The film opens with scenes of them on vacation, showing their love for each other. Sara works as a radio host of an upmarket talk show that blends talk with music; and Jean is a former rugby player with a prison record behind him and has spent several periods behind bars for unstated crimes. Jean has an alienated teenage son, Marcus (Perica), from a cross-racial previous marriage, and Marcus lives unhappily with Jean’s mother, Nelly (Ogier).

Before marrying Jean, Sara was living with Francois (Colin), who was Jean’s business partner; Francois was also Jean’s best friend, and Sara left Francois after a passionate encounter with Jean. One day, Sara catches sight of Francois on a city street while she is walking to work in Paris. Francois is planning to contact Jean to ask him whether he and Jean can establish an agency together, but there are reasons why Francois’ return may not be a coincidence.

Francois’ reappearance seriously threatens Sara’s relationship with Jean, and is a destabilising force in her marriage. At home, Sara and Jean quarrel with each other about what has happened, and is happening, and both decide to hide how they really feel. Their stable life has been ruptured abruptly by a shared past, and their arguments together reveal telling signs of underlying emotional conflict. Sara emotionally wants both her husband and her ex-lover, and she knows she is wounding the man, who is her husband, by what she is feeling and doing.

This is an infidelity drama that is toughly directed by Claire Denis, and its sexual scenes are intense. It is a film of deception and passion, that powerfully bares conflicting human emotions. The film attempts to capture a huge emotional range. Sara panics as her sexual desire for Francois returns, and Jean begins to rage at his perceived loss of his wife’s passion for him – which was strongly portrayed in the scenes that opened the film. The reunion of Sara and Francois under Denis’ probing direction reasserts the reality of what Jean suspects, and Binoche expresses the conflicts demanded of her character by impressive acting.

Sara slowly disintegrates in the crisis of being caught emotionally between her husband and her ex-lover. The film becomes a tense, erotic tale, and Denis directs her film by highlighting the coincidences of life that form the background to major life-decisions. The film builds strong tension by magnifying minor events into occurrences that have strong emotional urgency, and the musical soundtrack lets viewers know that something of consequence is occurring now, or will happen soon. The film also subtly skirts the dividing line between tragedy and melodrama – Sara encourages Jean to work with Francois, while knowing at the same time that she shouldn’t do so.

This movie is a slow-burn thriller of a love triangle in which the ambiguities of love, passion, and betrayal play out in a complicated way. The film is essentially about control and freedom in sexual relationships, and Denis, as director, dramatically, and ably, demonstrates the impossibility of holding onto genuine love, when betrayal occurs to destroy it.