Of all this year’s Berlinale prizes, Claire Denis’ Silver Bear for Best Director was the one seemingly every cinephile could agree on. With the win—incredibly, Denis’ first prize from any of the major international festivals—the 75-year-old French director caps a recent run of films that have broadened the scope and stylistic parameters of her work, and with it our understanding of a filmmaker whose output only gets stranger the further she journeys from the orbit of global art cinema. In that sense, bestowing an award on Denis for the fiery marital melodrama Avec amour et acharne ment, her fifteenth feature, is both a belated bit of recognition for one of the world’s great filmmakers and a not-insignificant show of support for a film that, in many ways, epitomizes a late period in which genre- and star-driven narratives have provided points of entry for Denis’ characteristic interplay of pain and pleasure, flesh and desire—themes aptly conveyed by Avec amour et acharnement’s many titles and (mis-)translations, which include Fire, With Love and Fury, and, perhaps most evocatively, Denis’ favourite, Both Sides of the Blade.
Avec amour et acharnement is Denis’ second collaboration with author Christine Angot, following upon Un beau soleil intérieur (2017), and the two are fascinating companion pieces. Both star
Juliette Binoche as a woman at an emotional crossroads, but in nearly every other respect—tone, setting, style, sympathy—the particulars are inverted. In the earlier film, a deceptively scathing spin on the romantic comedy that’s fairly comedic but hardly romantic, Binoche plays Isabella, a middle-aged divorcée who gives up a fling with a married man to get back in the dating game. Prospects are slim, with each subsequent suitor proving dopier and shallower than the last; as the film ends, an overweight psychic played by Gérard Depardieu tells her that none of these relationships will last, and to keep searching for the right man.
In (adapted from Angot’s 2018 novel ), which trades the sunlit environs of its predecessor for dark nights and overcast skies, the power dynamic is reversed. Here, Binoche plays Sara, a successful public radio host whose loving ten-year relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon) is tested when she falls back in
