You have to hand it to Denis. She doesn’t let up. Her latest feels like a vehicle for Binoche & Lindon, as the twin superstars of French cinema strut their tortured stuff. There are two ways of looking at Love and Fury: as self-indulgent Gallic melodrama; or, stripped to the bone, raw emotional heroin. Several scenes feel like they’ve been captured ‘in the moment’, as the two leads go head to head. The mood of the film is one of being constantly on the edge of something terrible about to happen, reflecting the reality of sharing a failing relationship, one which Jean (Lindon) and Sara (Binoche), for all the love their characters have for each other, are trapped in. It all starts to go tits up when François, Binoche’s ex-husband, reappears. His role is perhaps the weakest in the film, as he comes across as the equivalent of a male bunny boiler, evidently narcissistic bad news. That Sara, Binoche’s character, should be so readily infatuated with him seems, to this Anglo-Saxon temperament, implausible. If one were watching this in the guise of a psychologist, one might infer that Sara is using François to get out of her relationship to Jean, even if she would never admit it. In the end, both Sara and Jean seem to be more in love with the notion of romantic drama, relishing the big scenes, than getting on with their lives. The postscript , which perhaps has echoes of that alt-melodramatist, Reygadas, shows Jean happily reunited with his estranged son, one of the various under-developed strands in the film. (Why was Jean in prison; how does Sara’s instability affect her job as a radio presenter.) However, these details aren’t really the point. The structure of Avec Amour et Acharnement is gerrybuilt as a platform to allow the leads to do their thing, and if that’s your thing, you’ll roll with the film. And if it’s not, you won’t.
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