Movie Enthusiast Issue 42: Three Notes on Claire Denis; Lady Bird Thoughts; Video Essay News
Cinephiles tend to have strong emotions about Claire Denis, the septuagenarian French director usually known if at all for her 1999 exercise-video-as-homoerotic-hypnosis-session Beau Travail. I haven’t seen BT yet because it’s an elusive bird to track down and watch in suitably high quality, so whenever I see a new Denis film—as I just did this weekend—it’s always with a sense of lacking some crucial rosetta stone for making sense of her movies.
Of the three Denis films I’ve seen, all have been disturbing after their own fashion. In college, when I was an ardent follower of South Africa-born Variety film critic Guy Lodge and his recommendations, I sat down with my first Denis and one of Lodge’s all-time favorite movies, 2009’s White Material. Isabelle Huppert stars in the film as a coffee-plantation owner in Africa standing athwart political and racial turmoil that threatens to destroy the life she has built for herself and her family. Denis employs an unnerving half-formed-score throughout the film that gurgles and pulsates like some half-backed-up toilet beckoning for a plunging while threatening to blow without a moment’s notice. It’s a truly apocalyptic film: Denis reveals what fate awaits the white Frenchmen and -women whose colonialism is dying with desperate gasps. The movie ends with Huppert springing out from the shadows of an inferno with Shakespearian intensity and hacking her father’s head open with a machete. I took a 5-year-long pass on any further Denis.
My next run-in was no less unsettling. Trouble Every Day (2001), which I watched just a few weeks ago, is somehow even more disturbing than White Material, by which I mean that ***of course*** a movie about the cannibalistic sex drives of hot Parisian vampires is going to be super disturbing. This movie is a lot to take in all at once, both because of the gruesomeness of the premise and (primarily) because Denis is a savant when it comes to filming anguish made incarnate in the human body.
Trouble Every Day would normally be too far outside of my comfort zone to warrant watching, but I did want to do some prep-work for Denis’ newest film, Let the Sun Shine In, an advanced screening of which played in the D.C. area this weekend. Unlike her previous films, this one is a flat-out romcom. It stars Juliette Binoche as a divorced artist with one of those impossibly cool Parisian studio apartments and a truly unenviable inability to cope with the lack of love in her life. Not for lack of trying, though: Binoche’s character cycles through men and emotions and always runs crying to one or another of the poor souls patient enough to call themselves her friends when things invariably don’t work out with her latest paramour.
Denis makes a lot out of characters’ inability to say what’s on their minds, usually to comedic effect. In one scene, Binoche tries to have a chat with a gallery owner about a rumor she heard relating to her current flame. “Écoute!” she says, repeatedly, for about 2 minutes, trying to get this attentive and grimly-dressed woman to draw out from her the words that only Binoche can possibly speak into existence. I was incredulous at the scene’s start but as it stretched on irresolubly I was moved with the most exquisite discomfort. Later, in a scene of maddeningly bland tension (Denis gets a lot of mileage out of repeated cutaways to Binoche’s hand gripping the door handle of a car she’s determined not to get out of until the driver, with whom she’s hopelessly smitten, will make a romantic pass at her), Binoche and her meet-cute find resolution when they stop making small talk and start making out. “Oh thank GOD we can shut up now,” she moans, put out of her misery at last. (“At Last,” that famous Etta James recording, plays a weirdly central role in the film too. If you are having trouble picturing the film I am attempting to describe to you, please forgive me, I’m trying my best.)
Let the Sun Shine In shares with the other two Denis films I’ve seen a quality which I can only think to describe in this way: all three films feature characters who look like humans and who speak languages that definitely resemble human languages, yet these people are somehow not humans. It’s probably most pronounced in this most recent movie, which is closer in the details to what the hypothetical viewer’s life actually looks like (that is, assuming the rest of y’all aren’t secretly flesh-gorging vampires who just haven’t dropped the façade for me yet) (if so, please keep that façade up, thanks). I simply could not for the life of me connect to anything any of the behaviors any of the characters were engaging in…
…and yet, perhaps because of that bizarre and otherworldly quality, I did find myself watching with unexpected responsiveness. That slightly alien quality of Denis’ humans, so prone to externalizing their inner states in such larger-than-life ways, is nothing if not effective at making the viewer look at their own comparatively more modest behaviors in new light. Though I can’t count myself as big a fan of Denis as Nick Pinkerton is, I will conclude by deferring to his characteristically perceptive read on her career in his review of Let the Sun Shine In—
That Denis can produce a work that, without a trace of preciousness, is equal parts indebted to Barthes and Chicago blues, connected as arm is to shoulder to the film-historical legacy of post-New Wave French filmmaking, is only further justification for claim that the 71-year-old is the greatest working director over the last two decades. This estimation is not, apparently, universal. It might be taken as a slight, for instance, that Let the Sun Shine In premiered in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs section at Cannes this year, and not in Competition. No surprise, perhaps, as Denis’s film is the sort of thing usually discussed as a “minor,” the appellation usually applied to movies about love and intimacy, topics of almost universal relevance, as opposed to “major” works that indulge in the overblown oversimplification of barely understood historical periods, interminable “sculpting with time,” or the espousal of revolutionary creeds to well-heeled film festival audiences who know in their secret hearts that they will never in their lives participate in a violent uprising of any kind.
Every Frame a Painting, the popular video-essay series that has occasionally shown up in this newsletter, has officially ended. Co-creators Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos wrote a really lovely post on their decision to end the series, along with many of the lessons they learned from their years spent on this creative side-project. I’m particularly pleased to hear that a big part of their creative process involves extensive journal-keeping and book research.
In other video-essay-related news, David Ehrlich’s famous Best Films of the Year video countdown is due out later today. I’m expecting strong showings from Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, World of Tomorrow Episode 2, and Personal Shopper, though I’m also wondering whether he’ll throw TV—namely Top of the Lake: China Girl and Twin Peaks into the mix. Ehrlich’s taste has gotten almost humorously predictable (a fact that he is first of all to point out), but his videos are always the most sophisticated and thoughtful of their kind.
Speaking of Lady Bird…I saw Lady Bird, as many of you had been badgering me to (guys, I was never not going to see it). I liked it a lot, but I’m finding it difficult to write about it. It’s having such a moment both culturally and critically—last week the New York Film Critics Circle awarded it their Best Picture prize—that I almost feel like I need a few months to step back from it to see it more clearly. It was one of those movies you go into hoping your expectations will be met because you just know that you’re going to have to answer for yourself when people come around asking for your opinion. What I’ll say for now is: I’m very impressed by the tone Greta Gerwig strikes, I thought the casting was phenomenal across the board, I like Gerwig’s strong sense of comedic editing, and I’m especially satisfied by how she handles both the coming-out and being-curiously-drawn-to-religion-despite-a-non-religious-upbringing aspects of certain characters’ stories. Bug me again in a couple of months and I might have more thoughts for you.