Two Beautiful People Gazing at Each Other
The Beaux Travails of Claire Denis
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Fri April 25-Thurs May 8 at the Grand Illusion; see Movie Times for complete schedule.
Beauty saturates the cinema of Claire Denis. This is why there is very little plot in her films; plots can only be clever or entertaining, never beautiful. A plot needs to move; beauty does not. A plot needs depth, psychology, resolutions, the internal density of human beings--their pasts, their futures. Beauty needs nothing but the surface textures of the image. The beauty of the image is enhanced not by the mechanics of the plot but, from moment to moment, by its shifting relationship with other surfaces.
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Though inspired by these relationships, the beautiful surfaces in Denis' cinema are submerged in a watery world (be it the "dark black blood" of 2001's Trouble Every Day or the natatorial blues of 1996's Nénette et Boni) whose elements or atoms are bonded by invisible, shifting forces of attraction. Whoever enters the dark/blue realms of Denis' films is attracted to, and attracts, another image.
Claire Denis was born in Paris in 1948, and raised in a number of West and East African countries where her father worked as a civil servant. During the 1970s, she did little that would be of any real interest to her future admirers. The way she spent the 1980s, however, is significant: She was an assistant director for the then-masters of art-house cinema--Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Jacques Rivette. It was while shooting Wenders' Paris, Texas that she got the idea for her first film, Chocolat (1988). The desolate geography of America's Southwest reminded her of the desolate geography of her childhood in Africa. Chocolat may very well be the first film to imagine Africa in such terms--as desolate, empty, almost extinct. Usually, cinematic Africa is dense, filled with too much life and massive vegetation--it's the Africa of Conrad, where the "trees [are] kings."
But the world of Chocolat is marked not so much by the desolate geography as by the attractions that connect the always beautiful images--forms, faces--of Denis' characters. The most intense of these attractions is between the houseboy (the noble Isaach de Bankole) and the colonial administrator's wife (the exhausted Giulia Boschi). Also, the subject of the film, a young French woman named France (Mireille Perrier), is attracted to the middle-aged African man who offers her a lift into town near the beginning of the film (Emmet Judson Williamson). Their initial encounter is one of pure desire: She is on the beach gazing at the African's glistening body, and the eyes of the African--who turns out to be a cynical black American--are equally attracted to her French beauty. Indeed, one brilliant film critic for the Washington Post described Chocolat as "sex for the eyes."
The main attraction in Denis' cinema is sexual attraction. The moment when two people encounter each other we feel the vibrating, inchoate pulse of what may become the live wire of full-blown sex--which is precisely what her latest film, Friday Night, is about. The attraction, activated by a sudden gaze between a woman in a car (Valérie Lemercier) and a man walking through traffic (Vincent Lindon), is quickly realized in a one-night stand. In fact, attractive people frequently gaze at each other in Denis' films, staring at each other's surfaces not in the hope of finding an answer to the mystery of their mutual attraction but in the pure wonder (and often the joy) of being attracted at all--as happens, near the opening of Nénette et Boni, between the baker (Vincent Gallo) and his voluptuous wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), whose body also attracts the eyes and fuels the erotic fantasies of a young customer (Grégoire Colin).
But Nénette et Boni shows the healthier, happier consequences of attraction--voluptuous dreams, satisfied lovers managing a local bakery. More often, the attraction initiated by the eyes of Denis' characters deforms into madness, long-term sorrow, or death. For example, the sprawling story in I Can't Sleep (1994) is entirely set at the torpid end of a failed romance between a handsome Caribbean immigrant (Alex Descas, the Denzel Washington of the French-speaking world) and a Parisian (Béatrice Dalle, whose "physical attributes" Denis has correctly defined as "unbelievable"). Where as I Can't Sleep details the dark post-world of a fallen, deformed attraction, No Fear, No Die and Denis' masterpiece Beau Travail ("beautiful work") detail the processes or circumstances leading to the final fall.
In No Fear, No Die (1991)--the follow-up to Chocolat--two handsome black immigrants (one, Isaach de Bankole, is African; the other, Alex Descas, is Caribbean) are employed by a dodgy French businessman (Christopher Buchholz) to train roosters for a cockfighting arena the Frenchman illegally operates in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse in an abandoned part of the city. The attraction is between the Caribbean and the French businessman's lover (Solveig Dommartin, whose Nordic beauty obsessed the melancholy angel in Wings of Desire). The Nordic beauty interrupts the handsome Caribbean while he's training the cocks for battle. The handsome islander initially resists--he does not want the Nordic beauty near himself or his fighting birds--but for one reason or another, she always finds a way to interrupt him, to reengage his eyes, to dance with him in a discotheque. Their attraction intensifies, and by the near-end of the film it is in desperate need of some kind of satisfaction; it must translate its energy into either the productive motions of sex or a destructive act of violence. Sadly for the characters in this film, the conclusion is violent death.
Beau Travail (1999), on the other hand, does not end in violence but in long-term sorrow. Set on a French military base in Djibouti (formerly French Somaliland) composed of 15 or so multiracial young soldiers (whose bodies have been sculpted to perfection by rigorous exercises that would better prepare them for a modern dance piece than an actual battle), the film concerns the arrival of a new recruit (Grégoire Colin) whose extraordinary beauty attracts everyone--and everyone submits to this attraction except the sergeant (Denis Lavant). Instead of surrendering, the compromised sergeant stages a bitter psychological offensive against what he and the other soldiers see: the young man's dreamy movements in the sun, in the desert, at the seaside; the impeccable truth of his flesh, chest, nose, and, of course, eyes. Finally, the sergeant commits a crime (abandoning the young soldier in the desert, where he is rescued by an angelic African woman)--and for this crime he is expelled from the land of sunshine and condemned to spend the rest of his days in a subterranean afterworld that's as torpid as the one in I Can't Sleep.
The poster for Beau Travail may very well be the poster for Claire Denis' cinema: two beautiful people (Grégoire Colin and Denis Lavant) gazing at each other. The question posed by this extended gaze is the key question in all Denis films: Can attraction have a happy ending? Though the characters may beg to differ, the existence of Denis' body of work answers the question with a resounding yes.
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