The latest film from Claire Denis couldn’t be more French if it was smoking Gauloises and wearing a Breton top. A scrapbook of the wryly observed failed relationships of Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), it’s talky (incessantly so at times), knowing and ironic. It’s also unexpectedly light in tone. “Frothy” is something of a departure for Denis, best known for the savage poetry of films such as Beau Travail and White Material. You keep expecting to discover a razor blade embedded in the soap. But none appears. Neither, in this skittish flit from break-up to brush-off, does the film give us much to get our teeth into apart from Binoche’s mercurial and pleasingly readable performance.
Divorced artist Isabelle is certainly beguiling. The film’s seemingly endless queue of slavering French men can’t be wrong. Wearing their midlife crises like optimistically trendy haircuts, Isabelle’s suitors talk themselves in and out of her bed. Meanwhile, a score of laid-back jazz wafts through the film like the smoke from a post-coital cigarette.
Although the material is conventional, Denis’s approach, at least, is interesting. The trajectories of relationships are interrupted, and we build up a fractured portrait of Isabelle and her romantic life from snapshots rather than an in-depth examination of a single encounter. It’s not wholly satisfying. For all the scenes of Isabelle, moist-eyed, contemplating her latest breakup, there’s a flippancy here that adds a veneer to the film, making it a struggle to access any real emotional depth. But then, it wouldn’t be a Claire Denis film if it didn’t make us work a little.
