André Téchiné
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It’s the “Blue Is the Warmest Color” problem all over again — not so much the male gaze (DP Jeanne Lapoirie is a woman; she has shot several queer classics, including “Wild Reeds” and “BPM”) as the conceit that two inexperienced female lovers, deprived of role models, would have porn-caliber sex their first time out, changing positions multiple times for the benefit of a steamy montage.
And Assayas’s casting adds layers of meta-textual nostalgia (he co-wrote Binoche’s own breakthrough film as a 20-year-old, Rendez-vous) and mischief as Twilight star Stewart makes earnest defence of fantasy blockbusters, and Jo-Ann’s hounding by the press mirrors Stewart’s own.
That Assayas has chosen to do it with Juliette Binoche as his star represents a return to a creative collaboration the filmmaker and actress began nearly three decades ago in "Rendez-vous."
Juliette Binoche is at the peak of her powers in an autobiographically inflected role created for her by Olivier Assayas, co-writer of Rendez-vous, which helped kick-start her screen career in the mid-80s.
And didn’t Juliette Binoche, who plays Maria, get her breakthrough with Rendez-Vous, written by Assayas?
Assayas had helped catapult Binoche to French film stardom by co-writing the fluid, jolting erotic melodrama Rendez-vous (85), in which she played a hyper-sexualized gamine.
(More meta-ness: Assayas wrote André Téchiné’s 1985 film Rendez-vous, which was one of Binoche’s earliest starring roles.)
Favoring leatherette minis accompanied by four-inch heels or the thigh-high boots she’s seen struggling her way out of—viewers of Bastards (2013) will recall that Denis is singularly attentive to shoes—Isabelle is perhaps Binoche’s most purely carnal role since that of the bed-hopping Nina in André Téchiné’s Rendez-vous (1985), though the nature of the need that she exudes here, playing a woman some 30 years older, is very different, if no less urgent.