“With love and relentlessness”, couple trouble – Liberation

Claire Denis’ feature film draws an escalation of temptation and possessiveness punctuated by confrontations between Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin.

Adaptation of a novel by Christine Angot awarded at the Berlinale this year, With love and determination is reassuring on the outside (French stars love each other in a Parisian apartment overlooking the rooftops), rough on the inside. If this x-ray in very close-ups of the couple starts from a realistic canvas, another film, more frenzied, is superimposed on it, favoring a hatched treatment. Inside the triangle formed by Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film describes an escalation of temptation and possessiveness punctuated by confrontations, which are both spurts of words and loops of denial. We drool there, meow and talk nonsense until short of breath. It is not said that the scenario finds the balance between its abstraction on the one hand and its will to give flesh to characters on the other. To be honest, this is not our favorite vein of Claire Denis’ cinema, who has never stopped working on a line of flight where the star-system and experiments dialogue. The experience is extremely unpleasant, and the interest to be found in it has escaped us.

With love and determination by Claire Denis, with Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon, Grégoire Colin… 1h56.