Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche have already three films together. We could talk about a trilogy, since the French filmmaker presented Stars at Noon this year at Cannes, which does not feature Binoche. This is the chronicle of a happy, and historic, encounter that culminates with Fire, which hits theaters on September 30.
If Binoche, who is now 58 years old, is very probably the best actress of her generation, contemporary cinema cannot be understood without Denis, who has seeded the 21st century with works as monumental as Beau Travail (2000), Trouble Every Day (2001 ), L'intrus (2005) or 35 rhums (2009), among others. Practically since she made her debut with Chocolat (1988), a film inspired by her African adolescence, Claire Denis (Paris, 1946) has been considered the quintessential filmmaker of bodies, the one who has best filmed them, attentive to the mysteries of their shapes. Denis confirms that “when I want to tell a story, the proximity of the bodies helps me a lot. I like to film sex scenes, either with teenagers or with more mature characters like those from Fuego, who also seem very attractive and beautiful to me.”
Binoche's body had already been thoroughly explored in that hypnotic sidereal adventure called High Life (2018), where the actress underwent a kind of machine to produce orgasms. But Denis is also, and this is less said, a filmmaker of faces: despite the fact that Binoche has shot with great masters such as Assayas, Carax or Godard himself and longed for, she has never shone as brightly as in Un bello sol interior ( 2017), a radiant film that launched the trilogy five years ago. For the filmmaker, modest to the point of falling into masochism, this is simply because "in that series of sentimental catastrophes inspired by Roland Barthes's Fragments of a Love Speech, there was a lot of comedy, a certain happiness that made her shine."
Fire, the last installment of the trilogy, can be seen as the inversion of the classic love triangle, made up of, in addition to Binoche, two very common actors in his filmography, such as Grégoire Colin and Vincent Lindon. The story is very loosely based on a very autobiographical novel by Christine Angot, which has not yet been translated into Spanish. Angot and Denis, who already collaborated on the script for Un bello sol interior, have known each other for a long time: “I know both Angot's partner and the relationship he had in the past, and I had to distance myself from them, and that's why I changed them quite a bit. In the novel, for example, the character that Lindon plays is sick, he has a serious kidney disease, and I think that's what keeps Christine from leaving him. But I didn't want compassion to play a role in this story either."
In this inverted love triangle, the point of view is that of Binoche, that is, that of the woman, who lives happily with Lindon, until the fatal man embodied by Colin reappears, like a ghost from the distant past. "Yes, Colin embodies destiny, in the same way that before, from the same Bible, it was the woman who brought sin home." Colin's reappearance destabilizes Binoche, since he rekindles the fire of an uncontrollable passion that he preferred to consider, for sentimental comfort, as extinguished. But she, although she suffers for Lindon, does not feel guilty in a Christian sense, she does not feel like a traitor and corrects her partner when it seems to her that he loses his temper in this situation that is completely heartbreaking for him.
It is also interesting how, faced with Colin's reappearance, neither of them, neither Binoche nor Lindon, manage to tell each other the whole truth: “They lie to each other out of fear of what this reappearance entails. They lie to each other, and at the same time, they play with fire.” The character of Lindon, a man with a shady past, fundamentally wounded, an ex-prisoner, with family problems and unemployed, will agree to partner with Colin to remake himself, despite the fact that this inevitably puts his relationship with Binoche at risk and tests. Fire is a dance around the flames of passion, which, once again, has the voice of Stuart Staples as its soundtrack, which has sounded in Denis' films since the days of Nénette et Boni (1996).
Fuego was born during the lockdown as a reunion of old friends in need of making movies, and the result is a strange ballet of bleeding hearts in which anyone who has lived can come to recognize themselves. “This love story could not have been shot with teenagers, I needed to do it with people who had a past. Love is still the most important thing, in life as in the movies."
