Fragments instead of speech – Weekend – Kommersant
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A new painting by Claire Denis is released, criticized by critics after the premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. The audience will almost certainly share this dissatisfaction – “With Love and Fury” is more like not a whole movie, but a collection of separate fragments of some big off-screen story.
The heroes of the new Claire Denis film are Sarah and Jean, spouses of a fairly respectable age, plus or minus 60 playing them Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon. Their Russian peers are already advertising the Healthy Moscow pavilions with might and main, but Sarah and Jean live in the vanilla reality of the melodrama of their times youth: the film opens with a drawn-out bucolic scene in which they splash in the sea, showering each other with kisses. Passion has not subsided, although they have been together for 10 years. True, most of this time, Jean shook the term; for what is unknown.
This, however, is not the only mystery in the biography of the heroes, we know practically nothing about them, a bare minimum: Sarah is a journalist for Radio France Internationale, which broadcasts to the former colonies, so every day at work she calls up on zoom with interlocutors from Lebanon or Africa, by listening to their accounts of a humanitarian disaster or speculation about innate racism. Jean seems to be a former athlete (or coach?), Rugby player. He also has an old mother and a black son from his first marriage, Marcus, who live in distant Vitry-sur-Seine. Marcus, of course, is a difficult teenager who skips school and steals money from his grandmother’s credit card. Now Jean is sitting without a job, but he is hatching a certain “project” – apparently, in connection with it, he endlessly walks with papers around government offices.
Ten years ago, there was a third in this happy family structure. A certain François (Gregoire Colin), Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, from whom she left for Jean (which did not prevent them from becoming friends later). Actually, the real story begins with Francois’ comeback: first, Sarah accidentally notices him on the street next to the editorial office, and then he offers Jean a job in his small recruiting agency. The appearance of this obviously unpleasant type with a face that seems to be drained (physiognomy is the last hope of the viewer of this picture to understand at least something about the characters) causes Sarah a wave of warm memories of no one knows what.
Denis immediately labels François as a scoundrel, showing a scene in which he tries to persuade Sarah to anal sex with cunning and perseverance. And now she is already standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, whispering: “And here is love again! Sleepless nights again! Jean learns about everything almost immediately.
Without a doubt, Claire Denis is an original, powerful and interesting director. But along with obvious masterpieces (like “High Society”, which once revealed to us the dramatic talent of Robert Pattinson), her filmography often includes misunderstanding films made about some imaginary people with implausible passions and problems. A good example is the wildest movie about revenge “Glorious Bastards” with Chiara Mastroianni and the same Lindon, based on Faulkner’s “Asylum” and Kurosawa’s “The Bad Sleep Well”. “With Love and Fury” also cannot be called a watchable film, but the feeling of heaviness and stuffiness is not at all connected with the director’s style – although Denis, of course, pumps up the atmosphere, focusing on close-ups of elderly faces and bodies, the crampedness of Parisian attic apartments and repetitive refrain frames of passage through the tunnels. The point is the extreme conventionality, the lifelessness of people in the frame. Lovers are like variables in an equation, and the formula invented by the author must subdue human circumstances, characters, and a unique biography.
It is clear where this escheat formalism comes from: “With Love and Fury” was not filmed according to the original script, this is an adaptation of a short story by Christine Ango (in the late 2010s, she and Denis were already working on another film adaptation – almost unsuitable for film adaptation of Roland’s Fragments of a Lover’s Speech Bart). The change of mediums fatally affected the texture: the introspection of the heroine in love, turned into a movie, in which the point of view – always obviously external in relation to the characters – became speculative and implausible. Of course, someone else’s soul is dark, and passions are submissive to all ages. But still, I want to know what constellation of desires, neuroses and fantasies brought Binoche’s overage heroine to such a state when she not only talks to a mirror, but convincingly falls into childhood, destroying a seemingly passionate, happy and full-fledged relationship. The lack of this detail, the authenticity of the motives and the background of the characters makes the film at first look like a streaming Russian TV series, only played by good actors.
To Denis’s credit, it must be said that this annoying understatement becomes definitely conceptual closer to the finale, the obscurity of the plot thickens into completely detective darkness. Holes in the chronology of the story begin to spread rapidly (here I even want to joke that the movie is actually not about love, but about early dementia), the lines of the narrative and replicas break off, like a mobile connection in a tunnel, and we can only guess from individual scenes, what are we dealing with. With melodrama? The story of the revenge of an abandoned lover? Or the plot of women’s liberation from patriarchal conventions? Or maybe, on the contrary, a parable of betrayal? The discouraging finale makes it clear that all the most interesting things are left behind the scenes, and we were only casual witnesses of some big story rooted in the past. Perhaps in the past of Denis and Ango themselves – in any case, these fragments of the lovers’ speech look much closer to the spirit of Barthes’ book than the comic story of the romantic artist adored by men, filmed by them in 2017.
In theaters from 8 September
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