Sara is in a relationship with Jean. They love each other. They’re happy. By chance, Sara sees her former lover, François. The one who, years earlier, had introduced her to Jean and whom she had left for Jean. This figure from the past will gradually return to the life of the Parisian couple and, insidiously, call everything into question.
After A beautiful inner sundirector and screenwriter Claire Denis reunites with actress Juliette Binoche and writer Christine Angot in an adaptation of her novel A turning point in life (Flammarion, 2018). And if the reviews of the French novelist’s book have been mixed, its cinema version, Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale, leaves no room for doubt.
Let’s talk about doubt, precisely. It is central in With love and determination : Should I take this risk? Did I make the right choice? Can I trust him? So many uncertainties that will gradually undermine the couple formed by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, alias Sara and Jean.
But even more than doubt, it is feminine desire that founds the story ofWith love and determination. Sara’s desire for Francis. She doesn’t want to admit it to herself at first, then hides it, but he devours her. Sara is however not a victim, far from it. The film explores a feminine desire that refuses clichés and Manichaeism to better bring us back to cruel reality.
The art of detail
The genius of Claire Denis is expressed in the details. The French director attaches particular importance to the hands of her characters, which appear in close-up in the middle of the scenes and into which all the emotional tribulations that the protagonists experience are poured out. The heroes speak little, but Denis gives us their unacknowledged thoughts on a platter just enough time for a furtive shot more significant than all the monologues she could have written with Angot. The best example of this is surely this close-up of Sara’s stockings sticking out of the slit in her skirt when she is about to see François for the first time at a party, betraying her irrepressible desire to to please his former companion.
François, for his part—this is the whole brilliance of the story—is at first only a distant shadow. It is just if the actor who gives it body, Grégoire Colin, appears on the screen. But already this shadow comes to obscure the judgment of Sara and Jean. The character with the face of a predator has an almost palpable ascendancy over the two, and even more so over Sara. Her desire for him turns to obsession – to relentlessness, as the title suggests, which she tries in vain to hide, but which Denis exposes in broad daylight by borrowing one of the most highlights of Stanley Kubrick in shining (no need to tell you which one, you’ll recognize the reference the second you see it).
Become one with the characters
Becoming one with the emotional crescendo of each scene, the camera scratches the surface of the characters when the tension is at its highest and captures the slightest jolt of interpretation.
Brilliantly filmed, the performance of the actors alone is worth the trip to dark rooms. Juliette Binoche is amazing, as always. As for Vincent Lindon, if it were still necessary, he proves all the power of his inner game and imposes himself as a figurehead in the middle of this prestigious distribution. The actor, crowned at Cannes in 2015 for The law of the marketgives a breathtaking performance from start to finish, giving all the necessary scope to the unspoken words so dear to the director of Chocolate and 35 rums.
At the height of her art, Claire Denis signs a drama as close as possible to the complexity of romantic relationships, without makeup or sweetening, and above all, without trying to clear her characters, whom she places in front of their actions. deeply devastating, With love and determination sends us back to our own faults and our illusory quest for freedom from guilt.