Female Film Critics 24/375
Playing the headmistress of a 1960s “homemakers’ institute,” Juliette Binoche spends the first part of the French dramedy How to Be a Good Wife in trim pastel suits, knee-length skirts, and scoop-necked tops. She snips flowers while wearing gloves, pours tea with her legs crossed in heels, and showers herself in douses of perfume and hairspray. Then, she discovers pants.
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The San Sebastian International Film Festival will honor French movie star Juliette Binoche with one of its Donostia Awards, the Spanish fest’s career achievement prize. She will receive the award in recognition of her extensive career, “which has seen her play almost 75 characters, from power-wielding heroines to fragile beings, with historical figures, drama roles and comedy parts along the way.”
Plus, the poster for the 70th San Sebastian Film Festival features a portrait of Binoche taken by French photographer Brigitte Lacombe.
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Winner of the prestigious Best Director Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, French director Claire Denis tackles tough emotional fare in Both Sides of the Blade. It dramatizes three people’s lives hurtling into passionate, tense moments.
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Spending time with an old and not entirely extinguished flame when in a supposedly happy relationship is always a bad idea. It will be an ill-advised test of willpower at best, and at worst the height of hubris. That’s what happens in director Claire Denis’s romantic drama Both Sides of the Blade, which Denis wrote with co-screenwriter Christine Angot, based on Angot’s 2018 novel Un Tournant de Vie (A Turning Point of Life). They’ve created a visceral, intense slow burn about a destructive love triangle that spirals out of control with the help of stars Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon, and Grégoire Colin. Denis won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival for her work on the film.
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The power of love, the need for validation, and the nature of identity are compellingly tangled in Who You Think I Am, director Safy Nebbou’s adaptation of French writer Camille Laurens’ novel. Juliette Binoche stars as Claire Millaud, an accomplished academic who’s drifting and lonely in the wake of a midlife divorce. Her impulsive decision one night to pose as a much younger woman online leads to both joy and heartbreak.
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Who You Think I Am had me at Juliette Binoche, and Binoche’s character, French literature professor Claire, had me at the mention of Marguerite Duras. Yes, this smart and textured dark comedy of manners-meets-Hitchcockian thriller deftly mixes Claire’s feminist viewpoint lectures about Duras, Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses with a deliciously twisty and topical plot about Claire’s dangerous dalliances on social media.
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Director Safy Nebbou’s best move was to hire the still-fabulous Juliette Binoche to play a desperately lonely French lit professor in Who You Think I Am. They may try to hide her beauty behind reading glasses and messy hair, but the actress is still as glowing as she was in 1996’s The English Patient and her commitment to this sometimes strained social-media conceit is quite riveting to observe.
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The French-language family drama marks the first film written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda outside his native Japan. But “The Truth” has such an air of authenticity that it seems like the auteur, who won the 2018 Palme d’Or at France’s Cannes Film Festival for “Shoplifters,” has been making movies in Paris his whole life.
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The Truth is a classic addition to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s always-impressive resume. With greats such as Catherine Deneuve, Juliet Binoche and Ethan Hawke sharing frames, there’s a combination of looseness and depth to the movie’s central portrayals that’s trademark Kore-eda.
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This story might have been more promising on paper than it is on film. Certainly, the cast promises more than any of the stars deliver. The director, Hirokazu Kore-eda, became known last year for his film Shoplifters. Those who thought that movie was overblown should not expect much from The Truth.
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