A love triangle story about a woman caught between two men, her long-time partner and his best friend, her former lover.... (Full plot summary below)
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A love triangle story about a woman caught between two men, her long-time partner and his best friend, her former lover.
Leave your thoughts about Both Sides of the Blade.
| RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyBoth Sides of the Blade is a romance, a love triangle, a marriage drama, an infidelity narrative, all familiar ground, but Denis' approach is her own. |
| Slant MagazinePat BrownThe studied ambiguity of what’s going on in Fire doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller. |
| Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiHuman beings can be really complicated. And thankfully, there are filmmakers around like Claire Denis who make films such as Both Sides of the Blade to remind us of that complexity. Films that seemingly help us in trying to understand each other, but really show us that we might never be able to. |
| Little White LiesDavid JenkinsThere was never a question of whether this would be a great movie, but the pleasant surprise is that it is, in fact, a very great one. |
| Screen DailyJonathan RomneySome viewers may find it hard to credit the emotional extremes on display here, which seem more to do with the codes of French psychological drama than with the way people might actually behave in real relationships. Indeed, Binoche has not always convinced in conventional terms when playing women in a psychosexual fluster. Nevertheless, it’s something that she specialises in, and she pushes that register a lot further here – and far more compellingly - than in Denis’s Sunshine. |
| VarietyGuy LodgeDenis’ latest sees her applying her usual rigorous form and psychological curiosity to material that tends to inspire more generic directorial treatment, teasing out a rich, nuanced exploration of female desire from the fault lines of an ostensibly simple narrative. |
| San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleBoth Sides of the Blade is what people like about French cinema. Its indulgences are worth wading through because, in its commitment to the truth about people and its willingness to explore the hugeness of normal human life, it’s unlike anything you’ll find in America. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreThis Juliette Binoche drama has heat and hurt and a whiff of intrigue as Denis (“High Life,” “Beau Travail”) peels away layers of background that reveals more and more of the true nature of her characters. |
| The Film StageRory O'ConnorIt isn’t difficult to imagine Denis–one of the most cerebral, confounding filmmakers we have–constructing Fire, with its oddly trivial love triangle and omnipresent string section, as a duplicitous farce; a way to upend our expectations of how a film like this should look. |
| Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangWatching it, you can feel Denis zeroing in on the conventions of the bourgeois French melodrama with something resembling a lover’s playfulness; she wants to rough them up, test their limits and bend them into challenging new configurations. |
