Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival in 2022 and dedicated to the Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, Avec amour et acharnement is an adaptation of the novel Un tournant de la vie (2018), by Christine Angot, whose name appears here alongside Claire Denis’s as screenwriter, just as it did for Un beau soleil intérieur (2017). A portrait of the love triangle between Sarah (Juliette Binoche), culture journalist for Radio France Internationale, Jean (Vincent Lindon), her husband who used to be a professional rugby player, and François (Grégoire Colin), the lover who, according to the text, “brings the past with him”, the film opens itself up to various adjacent readings. The narrative construction of this romantic intrigue draws out a symptomatology (or hauntology, in the Derridean sense) of contemporary French society and its malaise, here linked to the colonial question, which has permeated Denis’s work since her first feature film, Chocolat (1988), to the persistence of colonial structures and to the intersection of social and racial divisions.

Avec amour rethinks relations between the centre and the periphery. The opening sequence is filmed on a Corsican beach, a setting that not only speaks to French imperialism but also evokes the politics of European migration and passage across the Mediterranean. Bestowed with great sensuality and an important haptic dimension, it portrays the bodily contact between Sarah and Jean. Yet, the découpage and editing of this scene of fusional tension, as well as its sound treatment (silence, and the soundtrack composed by the band Tindersticks), prefigure the disintegration to come and point incisively towards a malaise that is simultaneously individual, collective and historical. In the next sequence, now filmed in France, Paris appears not as the reverse, but as a continuation or prolongation of the Corsican space and time, a place that is historical and political more than it is physical. The French capital is represented in a manner that seems based on the principle of de-centralisation. Éric Gautier’s camera shows us the porosity between “here” and “there”, a dislocation of the defining parameters of centrality indicating that the colonial paradigm has been transposed to the original space of the metropole. Avec amour makes systems of domination tangible, revealing the (dynamic) articulation between categories of class and race in contemporary French society — in particular, at the level of the technical division of labour. Jean, an unemployed ex-convict who is economically dependent on Sarah, hopes to help Marcus (Issa Perica), his mixed-race son born to a mother from Martinique and living with his paternal grandfather (Bulle Ogier) in the outskirts of Paris, escape “the fate of Black and Arab” kids. In parallel, on one of her radio programmes, Sarah interviews the French ex-footballer Lilian Thuram, author of the book La Pensée Blanche (2022), which draws on the thinking of Frantz Fanon to define normative constructions regarding whiteness. Also of note is the presence of the French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop in the role of Gabrielle.

Denis’s film goes beyond normative constructions, whether related to race, gender or class — categories that are in themselves problematised (note, for example, the reference to Cahier d’un art de vivre: Cuba 1964-1978, the intimate diary of the Haitian writer René Depestre written during the Cuban Revolution). It does this precisely through a poetics and politics of space. The couple’s Parisian apartment acts as a metonymic zone, being a second transient area between the centre and periphery, inside and outside. Alternations between interior and exterior shots — and the scenes filmed on the balcony, an adjacent space that is neither inside nor outside — mark the transition points between the domestic monogamous life of this bourgeois couple and the adultery of Sarah, as well as the gradual confluence of the two lines of the narrative. These transitions gain an important formal dimension, liberating the characters’ bodies and pointing towards their free-will and capacity for resistance, especially in the film’s final sequence. Just as the depiction of the lovers’ bodies, in pathos — emotional bodies, “fierce”, bodies affected by the spectral return of the past — reveals the inextricable link between individual, collective and historical malaise, the architectural space of the film helps us to see the interstices between interior and exterior, centre and periphery, the old spaces of the metropole and the ex-colony. Yet it is perhaps in the relationship between Paris, where the couple lives, and its periphery, that this interstitiality becomes most striking. The shots of Jean’s car crossing the Boulevard périphérique that separates Paris from the suburbs make visible that “abyssal line” [1] between two spheres, while also revealing their connection and reversibility — namely through the “panoramic perception” [2] of the space — thus suggesting a possible dissolution of the division, in a powerful gesture that is both political and epistemic.

This reflection on the relation between centre and periphery also finds its own formal dimension in Avec amour. The film’s formal system embraces an aesthetic of the empty and inorganic to represent the confinement and emancipation of bodies in the context of a pandemic, and the reconfiguration of the relationship between man and machine. The medium close-ups, close-ups and even extreme close-ups accentuate this double shift, pointing towards a redefinition of the visual paradigm and the crisis of the figure of the observer and how they relate to technological devices and their own self-image [3]. Both the composition of the shots, recalling Hammershøi’s paintings and exploring the emptiness of images [4], and the interpolation between scenes from which characters are absent (urban landscapes, day-to-day objects, technological devices), ex-centralise the human body from representational space, thus reinforcing the tension between the state of being inside and outside the field — a field that is simultaneously narrative and historical. Ever since Chocolat, Denis’s filmography has explored perception and its structures, especially through a mise en situation of the gazes of her characters. In Avec amour, the construction of the position of the onlooker is marked by a tension between the point of view of her characters — who act as vehicles for a vision of French society — and the almost vigilant perspective placed upon them. In certain sequences, such as the reunion with François, the film operates in a manner similar to free indirect speech — brought to the field of cinema by Pasolini [5] — as a means of expressing an enaction of collective voice, speaking to the inseparable link between historical and individual planes, the political and the intimate. Avec amour thus consolidates the singular nature of Denis’s work in the landscape of contemporary French cinema.

[1] Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, “Para além do Pensamento Abissal: das linhas globais a uma ecologia de saberes”. Epistemologias do Sul / ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses. Coimbra: Almedina, 2009, pp. 23-71.

[2] Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2014.

[3] Crary, Jonathan. 24/7. London and New York: Verso, 2014.

[4] Moure, José. Vers une esthétique du vide au cinéma. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

[5] Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Empirismo eretico. Lingua, letteratura, cinema: le riflessioni et le intuizioni del critico e dell’artista. Milan: Garzanti, 1991