Claire Denis makes films with little dialogue but lots of plot, so to speak, telling stories that drift instead of drive, eager to elide narrative. This is not to say her films lack coherence. Rather, their elliptical structure refuses "easy" digestion or dismissal.
Born in Paris but raised in Africa, Denis grew up a furtive reader. She disdained her initial path of economics study and so enrolled at the French film school, IDHEC. After graduation she served as an assistant director to Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. It was not until 1988, at the age of 40, that she made her first feature film,
Chocolat: shot on location in colonial Cameroon, the film tells a story about a young white girl named France and her friendship with native ("houseboy") Protée and his sexual tension with France's mother. While not as impressive as some later films,
Chocolat activated a career-long focus on the marginalized, the foreign and the duplicitous nature of Denis' native France, a country where the other is kept at bay.
The 1990s saw Denis release four feature films and one notable short:
S'en fou la mort (1990),
J'ai pas sommeil (1994),
US Go Home (1994, short),
Nénette et Boni (1996) and, what many consider her masterpiece,
Beau Travail (1998), which transports the Herman Melville novella
Billy Budd from marines at sea to French Foreign Legion officers in Djbouti in Eastern Africa. Gregoire Colin plays the Billy Budd analog, whose beauty and easy camaraderie unsettles (and attracts) the Claggart analog, Galoup, played by former circus performer Denis Lavant. Lavant's coda dance sequence is one of the most stirring endings in all of cinema.
2001 saw the love-is-cannibalism (or is it sex-is-vampirism?) meditation on marriage,
Trouble Every Day, which Walter Chaw says "captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable." Starring Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle, the nearly wordless film is noted for its extreme gore and fierce, unremitting posture, a film refusing categorization (or consumption, as on display) to the point that, aside from a cult following, the film enjoys none of the accolades of
Beau Travail. 2002's
Vendredi Soir came and went without much fanfare but 2004's
L'intrus, inspired by a book by Jean-Luc Nancy about his heart transplant, made waves. Some critics posited Denis had finally gone "pure cinema" with her lack of any exposition and opaque narrative jumps. She made a documentary,
Vers Mathilde, in 2005, about France's foremost choreographer, Mathilde Monnier, which operates as a thesis/summation for the Denis oeuvre's obsession with bodies in space (and their wake).
She has two films lined up for release in 2008 and 2009: respecitvely,
Matérial blanc and
35 rhums.
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