Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001)

Béatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day

Cast: Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Decas, Florence Loiret Caille, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphaël Neal, José Garcia, Hélène Lapoiwer, Marilu Marini, Aurore Clément. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Tindersticks. 

Claire Denis has steadily resisted linear storytelling and expository dialogue, preferring to trust audiences to pay attention, to assemble the narrative of her films themselves. The result has been films touched with greatness like Beau Travail (1999) and White Material (2009) that invite viewers to experience their stories with greater immediacy than if they were spoon-fed the relationships and motivations of the characters. But sometimes this demand on the viewer backfires, as I think it does in Trouble Every Day. Watching the film can be a visceral experience, a descent into transgressive behavior that's made more disturbing because Denis treats it so coldly. Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and Coré Sémeneau (Béatrice Dalle) are both afflicted with extreme versions of a malady, apparently contracted in Guyana, that causes them to become violent when sexually aroused. Shane has his mostly under control, it seems, except that he's newly married and on his honeymoon. To protect his wife from his impulses, he masturbates, once interrupting their intercourse to jerk off frantically. Coré's case has advanced much further: Her husband, a physician (Alex Descas), keeps her locked up, but she escapes to have sex and then bite vampire-like into the throats of her victims. Shane has come to Paris to see Dr. Sémeneau, who has been researching this disorder. After Trouble Every Day culminates in one of the most brutal rape scenes ever staged in a film, we're left with only the suggestion that sex and violence are intimately related, hardly a novel idea. It's one treated in, for example, the two movies called Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942, and Paul Schrader, 1982). Critics were mostly harsh when it was released, yet some revisionism has occurred, possibly because Denis is unquestionably a filmmaker who must be taken seriously. But unlike her best films, Trouble Every Day lacks the payoff of experiencing something meaningful. It ends up being only an intellectualized horror movie. 

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Richard Courcet, Nicolas Devauchelle, Adiatou Massudi, Mickael Ravovski, Dan Herzberg, Giuseppe Molino, Gianfranco Poddighe, Marc Veh, Thong Duy Nguyen, Jean-Yves Vivet, Bernardo Montet, Dimitri Tsiapkinis, Djanel Zemali, Abdelkader Bouti. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, based on a novella by Herman Melville. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Charles-Henri de Pierrefeu, Eran Zur. 

Claire Denis's Beau Travail doesn't really have much in common with Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991). Bigelow's film is pure pulp movie action thriller material, whereas Denis's is thoughtfully derived from a literary classic, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. But both films are directed by women with a keenly objective eye toward male display, the acting-out of testosterone-driven urges, a vision that gives these movies a special erotic charge. It might be worth bringing in a third film for consideration here: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982), a film made by a gay man that, like Denis's, also contains overtones of Billy Budd. But where Fassbinder's movie feels overheated, even campy, Denis's film, for all its intensity, has a coolness to it. I think that sometimes Denis, for all the scenes of barechested Legionnaires working out intensely, even intimately in the desert sun, is more restrained than she might be. The central conflict of her film, between Galoup (Denis Lavant), the movie's Claggart equivalent, and Sentain (Grégoire Colin), the Billy Budd of the movie, is fragmented in Denis's telling. All of the film's Legionnaires are handsome, so that Sentain doesn't stand out immediately from the group the way Melville's Billy does. The development of Galoup's jealous antipathy is subtly handled, mostly by casting the story as a flashback by Galoup after being court-martialed and expelled from the Legion -- this Claggart doesn't die. Neither, for that matter, does this Billy Budd, although he comes closer to it. But Beau Travail is still something like a great movie, maybe because Denis's avoidance of melodramatic excess and narrative hand-holding leaves it up to the viewer to draw inferences about motives and behavior. The film gets a great boost from Agnès Godard's hungry cinematography, a score that includes excerpts from another version of Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten's opera, and most especially from the Legionnaires' training routines, choreographed by Bernardo Montet.    

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

Mati Diop and Alex Descas in 35 Shots of Rum

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogué, Grégoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adèle Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly, Ingrid Caven. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Guy Lecorne. Music: Tindersticks.

If I hadn't read that Claire Denis said that 35 Shots of Rum was inspired by Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949), I'm not certain I would have spotted it. But once I learned that fact, it became obvious. Both films are about widowers living with their daughters, and both end with the daughter's marriage and the father contemplating loneliness. I would have to rewatch Late Spring to cite other parallels, but the central fact is that both films share a bittersweet, melancholy tone. It's striking to an American, especially one living in the Trump era of heightened racial awareness, that not much is made of the fact that Lionel (Alex Desecas) and Jo (Mati Diop) are black. It may be that it lingers as a subtext in the film, the way the devastation of Japan in the war lingers in the background of Ozu's films, surfacing in Denis's film only when the anthropology class Jo attends begins to discuss postcolonialism, with references to the radicalism of Frantz Fanon and other writers. Mostly, however, we stay in the enclosed world of Lionel and Jo and their friends, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Noé (Grégoire Colin). One of the film's challenges (and delights) is that Denis plunges us into their world without exposition, leaving us to discover the relationships (and even the names) of the characters as the narrative unfolds. For a while at the start of the film, I took Lionel and Jo to be a married couple or lovers, so close is their relationship, until it became apparent that they were father and daughter. Even the title takes some time to work out its significance: It refers to a ritual drinking bout that's supposed to occur at important celebrations, and we first see it at the retirement party of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), Lionel's fellow driver in the metropolitan Paris train system. Though Lionel gets fairly inebriated, he decides the occasion isn't important enough to consume all 35 shots of rum. Eventually, René is unable to cope with loneliness and lack of purpose after the mandatory retirement and kills himself on the train tracks where Lionel is driving. René's death adds poignancy to Lionel's facing life alone after Jo marries -- a wedding at which he does indeed go through with the 35 shots ritual. Denis's film is a subtle, moving delight, full of details that are enough to provoke extended contemplation or even a rewatching. Decas and Diop (who would go on to direct her own fine film, Atlantics, in 2019) give quietly extraordinary performances. 

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Devauchelle, William Nadylam, Michel Subor, Isaach De Bankolé, Adèle Ado, Ali Barkai. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Marie N'Diaye, Lucie Borleteau. Cinematography: Yves Cape. Production design: Abiassi Saint-Père. Film editing: Guy Lecorne. Music: Stuart Staples. 

Isabelle Huppert is an almost routinely extraordinary actress, and she gives one of her most striking performances in White Material, about the French owner of a coffee plantation in Africa. This is a far cry from Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1987), the glossy Oscar winner. Huppert's Maria Vial is a woman determined to the point of madness to get out her coffee crop during a civil war, even though the authorities have insisted she and her family should leave. Her husband, André (Christopher Lambert), is ready to flee, but she persists, even after their lazy, self-indulgent son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), is captured by young rebel soldiers, abused, and possibly raped. Things continue to escalate in ever more complex and chaotic ways. It's an often harrowing film, held together in large part by Huppert's magnetism. 

Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis, 2017)

Juliette Binoche and Xavier Beauvois in Let the Sunshine In

Isabelle: Juliette Binoche
Vincent: Xavier Beauvois
The Actor: Nicolas Duvauchelle
François: Laurent Gréville
Marc: Alex Descas
Fabrice: Bruno Podalydès
Sylvain: Paul Blain
Denis: Gérard Depardieu
Mathieu: Philippe Katerine
Maxime: Josiane Balasko
Ariane: Sandrine Dumas

Director: Claire Denis
Screenplay: Christine Angot, Claire Denis
Based on a book by Roland Barthes
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Production design: Arnaud de Moleron
Film editing: Guy Lecorne
Music: Stuart Staples

I'm not familiar with the films of Claire Denis, and to judge from the somewhat mixed reviews of Let the Sunshine In, I may have picked the wrong one to start with. It is certainly talky, in that peculiarly French way of batting ideas back and forth like tennis balls, without anyone ever scoring. It's hard for someone coming into it cold to figure out what it is: a psychological drama, a comedy, a treatise on love and sex? And it was only at the end, when Gérard Depardieu imposes his corporosity on the film, playing a kind of upscale guru/fortune teller who wags a pendant over the photographs of Isabelle's lovers and delivers "predictions" that have all the soothing ambiguity of a newspaper horoscope column, that I decided: It's a satire. Specifically, one directed at everyone's confusion about relationships. That realization almost made me want to go back and watch it again to confirm my revelation, but I'm not sure I can subject myself so soon again to all that talk. What makes the film work as well as many think it does is the performance of the always-wonderful Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, a woman with several lovers ... no, strike that, I mean sexual partners. The first one we see right away, the banker named Vincent, having sex with Isabelle. But there's no postcoital glow: Immediately, Vincent reveals himself as an absolute jerk, which is reinforced by a subsequent scene in a bar where Vincent pointlessly torments an innocent bartender, ordering him to place the bottle here, the glass there, and asking him if they have any "gluten-free olives." Next, there's an unnamed actor, with whom Isabelle definitely has chemistry, but who reveals himself to be as self-conscious about relationships as she is. And so on. The upshot is that Isabelle and her partners are guilty of what D.H. Lawrence denounced as "sex in the head." But the trouble with the film seems to me that it has no narrative shape: Isabelle is as confused at the end as she is at the beginning, so there's no arc to follow though the film. Her life is a series of crises that may feel achingly familiar to many viewers, but aside from some wonderful moments -- as when Isabelle mocks a group of her fellow artists, gathered for a symposium in the country, for their pretentious admiration of nature -- I felt emptier at the end of Let the Sunshine In than at the beginning.