A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, December 1, 2025

No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)

Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankolé in No Fear, No Die

Cast: Isaach de Bankolé, Alex Descas, Jean-Claude Brialy, Solveig Dommartin, Christopher Buchholz, Christa Lang, Gilbert Felmar, Daniel Bellus, François Oloa Biloa, Pipo Saguera, Alain Banicles. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Pascal Marti. Production design: Jean-Jacques Caziot. Film editing: Dominique Auvray. Music: Abdullah Ibrahim. 

Claire Denis's No Fear, No Die is a story about exiles trying to make it in the land that colonized their homelands: Dah (Isaach de Bankolé) is from Benin and Jocelyn (Alex Descas) is from the West Indies. They have come to France to make a fortune in cockfighting. Dah is the businessman and Jocelyn the trainer. Jocelyn provides the contact, Pierre (Jean-Claude Brialy), whom he knew when he was a boy. Eventually, tensions arise between Jocelyn and Pierre, especially after Pierre notices that Jocelyn finds his wife, Toni (Solveig Dommartin), attractive and even names one of the fighting cocks after her. Pierre suggests to Jocelyn that he used to have sex with the man's mother. The explosive human situation is heightened by the sequences depicting cockfights. Denis directs with her usual no-nonsense approach to the brutal actuality that lies hidden beneath the veneer of civilization. 

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