There are two sides to every blade, Claire Denis reminds us. Unfortunately, both of them in this film are dull. Both Sides of the Blade—original French title: Avec amour et acharnement, which roughly translates to With Love and Relentless Suffering—is a romantic drama for people who think passion is best expressed through passive-aggressive sulking and silence so long it legally counts as a coma.
Juliette Binoche plays Sara, a woman in her 50s who cries in well-lit kitchens and has a job as a radio host where she whispers about justice like a sentient NPR tote bag. She’s married to Jean, played by Vincent Lindon, a man whose body says “ex-rugby player” but whose face says “constipated existentialist.” They’ve been together for years. They live in an upscale Parisian apartment. Everything is beige, from the walls to their emotional lives.
Then enters François (Grégoire Colin), Sara’s ex and Jean’s old best friend. He’s got the smug charm of a man who still uses cologne and thinks ghosting is a form of therapy. He offers Jean a job. He offers Sara a sexual memory. And like that, the movie settles into its true form: a 116-minute emotional stalemate between three people who refuse to say what they feel until someone breaks a wine glass or jumps off a metaphor.
Now, to be fair: on paper, this should work. Binoche, Lindon, and Colin are top-tier talent. Claire Denis is no amateur. But what Denis does here is take the bones of a domestic thriller and boil them in melancholia until there’s nothing left but gristle and tears.
Let’s talk about the tone. Both Sides of the Blade wants to be erotic, but it’s about as sexy as watching your parents fight in IKEA. There’s a scene early on where Sara and Jean make love in the ocean. It’s supposed to be tender. Instead, it feels like watching two damp laundry bags gently collide. The water is murky. The chemistry is nonexistent. And the only emotion is confusion—ours, not theirs.
Denis, ever the minimalist, shoots these people like exhibits in an art museum: distant, observational, cold. We watch them cook, sit, stare. Long silences stretch into eternity. Conversations begin and end mid-thought. There’s no music to guide you. No catharsis. Just the soft hum of middle-aged despair wrapped in linen and filtered through grief.
Sara is the emotional core here, which is unfortunate because she’s also completely incoherent. One minute, she’s crying in the bathtub. The next, she’s putting on lipstick and texting François like a high schooler possessed by Virginia Woolf. Binoche is doing her best—God bless her—but Denis gives her nothing to work with except vague longing and a faceful of guilt. Sara is not a person. She’s a mood board of unresolved tension.
Jean, meanwhile, is the most inert romantic lead since petrified wood. He’s a man broken by past mistakes: prison time, a troubled son, and presumably years of marriage to a woman who won’t stop staring out the window. Lindon plays him like a bulldozer running on espresso and regret. He snarls. He seethes. He internalizes. He also never communicates anything, ever. You could replace him with a piece of drywall and still get the same dramatic weight.
François, the supposed “spark” of the story, is little more than a ghost in designer jeans. He floats in, ruins everything, then vanishes like a plot device in an indie short film. His relationship with Sara is never explained. Their connection? Never explored. He’s just there, like secondhand smoke or emotional rot. You don’t remember his lines—you just remember his smirk and wonder how someone so boring could cause this much chaos.
The cinematography, by Eric Gautier, is handsomely dull. Lots of gray Paris skies. Lots of neutral interiors. The camera rarely moves. It’s like watching emotional implosion unfold inside a high-end funeral home. Everything is technically correct, but there’s no heartbeat. Denis doesn’t build tension—she simmers it in its own indecisiveness until it evaporates completely.
Now, the dialogue. Oh, the dialogue. Characters speak in half-formed thoughts, like therapy patients who got bored halfway through unpacking their trauma. “I thought I had buried it,” Sara says about François. “But you didn’t,” Jean replies, with the warmth of a tax auditor. Most exchanges are just variations of that—accusation, denial, silence, repeat. It’s as if the script was assembled from fortune cookies left out in the rain.
The third act builds—if you can call it that—to a screaming match where everyone finally says what they’ve been not saying for 100 minutes. But by then, it’s too late. The emotional stakes have been so undercooked you could feed them to a vegan. Sara cries. Jean broods. François disappears. And the credits roll like an apology you didn’t ask for.
And then there’s the title. Both Sides of the Blade. It sounds profound. Duality. Danger. Betrayal. But Denis never commits to either side. She just hovers in the middle, asking us to feel something without ever giving us a reason to. It’s a love triangle where everyone forgot geometry.
Final Verdict?
Both Sides of the Blade is an arthouse tragedy about adult relationships, except no one behaves like an adult and the tragedy is that it exists. It’s Claire Denis’ attempt at a romantic drama that forgets to be romantic and barely qualifies as drama. It’s like watching a marriage crumble in slow motion, but without the satisfaction of a plate being thrown or a door being slammed. Just whispered regrets, wet kisses, and the emotional depth of a voicemail from your dentist.
Watch it if you like Juliette Binoche crying in three different bathtubs. Watch it if you think “longing” means “never making a decision.” Watch it if you enjoy yelling “JUST SAY SOMETHING!” at your screen for two hours. Everyone else? Use the blade. Cut yourself free. And go rewatch Fatal Attraction instead. At least that had a pulse.