Both Sides of the Blade (2022) on Netflix
NR20221h 56m
Sara and Jean have shared ten years together. She spots François, her ex and once Jean's closest friend, who now calls Jean with an offer to work with him again.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.1/104,118 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jean once played rugby professionally and has a prison record behind him. He lives in Paris with Sara, who works as a radio presenter, and the two have been together for ten years. Jean is an absent father to Marcus, his teenage son, who lives with Jean's mother Nelly in Vitry. When Sara glimpses François on the street, the sight stirs her: he is the man she was living with when she met Jean, and Jean's close friend at the time. François is starting a sports agency to sign young rugby players and gets in touch with Jean, whom he has not spoken to in years, to suggest they work together again.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Both Sides of the Blade (2022)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Claire Denis took the English title Both Sides of the Blade from a Tindersticks song that Stuart A. Staples wrote for the film and that plays at its conclusion. When she received the song during editing she was impressed by its quality as a title and thought the French title Avec amour et acharnement too difficult to translate.
- At the film's U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center in March 2022, Claire Denis publicly decried the English title Fire, saying "The film is not called Fire!" and that she had tried to speak with the distribution company about it. IFC Films changed the title that April.
- Both Sides of the Blade was made under France's COVID-19 lockdowns, which Claire Denis credits with bringing her and the cast closer together even as they became "exhausted, relentless". The pandemic exists in the film, and shooting a scene in the Paris Métro Denis found it impossible to pretend it didn't exist.
