Sex Is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)

Grégoire Colin and Roxane Mesquida in Sex Is Comedy

Cast: Anne Parillaud, Grégoire Colin, Roxane Mesquida, Ashley Wanninger, Dominique Colladant, Bart Binnema. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat. Cinematography: Lauren Mahuel. Production design: Frédérique Belvaux. Film editing: Pascale Chavance. 

Sex scenes are so common in movies today that producers routinely hire "intimacy coordinators" to supervise them, mostly to avoid lawsuits and media controversies of the sort that have followed the release of films as various as Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013). There are no intimacy coordinators in Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy. There's only the director, Jeanne (Anne Parillaud), who is trying to get the most out of the actors in the sex scene of the movie she's making. And this involves much pleading, coddling, coaching, and even bullying on Jeanne's part, especially since the actor played by Grégoire Colin and the actress played by Roxane Mesquida despise each other. Sex Is Comedy is based on Breillat's own experience filming a painful scene in a painful movie,  Fat Girl (2001). She is using this metafictional approach to examine several things, including the nature of acting, the role of the director, and the simulation of private intimacy as public performance. Despite its title, the movie provides very little comedy beyond some scenes involving the penile prosthetic the actor is forced to wear, and it ends in tears rather than laughter as Jeanne gets the performance she wants from the actress. Mostly, the value of Sex Is Comedy lies in the insights it provides into Breillat as the creator of films that push the boundaries of depicting sex on screen. 

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. 

Before the Rain (Milcho Manchevski, 1994)

Before the Rain wears its fractured and inconsistent narrative proudly, as if daring us to make sense not only of the film's plot but also of the centuries-old tradition of violent revenge that had recently manifested itself in the states of the former Yugoslavia. It seems to be three stories that, by the time the film ends, have merged -- or like the snake eating its tail, begun to swallow up one another. The first story, "Words," set in the Republic of Macedonia, is about a young monk (Grégoire Colin) who shelters a girl (Labina Mitevska) from a pursuing mob. The second, "Faces," which takes place in London, centers on a photo editor, Anne (Katrin Cartlidge), and her relationships with a prize-winning photojournalist, Aleksander (Rade Serbedzija), as well as her husband, Nick (Jay Villiers). The third, "Pictures," returns with Aleksander to his home village in Macedonia, where, weary of and disillusioned by his career, he plans to settle. Each segment of the film ends violently, suggesting that the murderous impulse is immanent not only in the world's hot spots but in the heart of civilization itself. As director and screenwriter, Manchevski attempts to explore the dark side of human nature and society without suggesting that he has an explanation, much less a solution, for it. He intentionally undercuts the coherence of the film by introducing inconsistencies between the three sections, such as photographs in one section of events that have not yet happened if the three stories are to be rearranged as a linear progression. The effect is to unsettle the viewer, to heighten the emotional impact of events by denying the intellectual response to them. I think Manchevski largely succeeds, although the London section strikes me as the most weakly conceived, and its climax rather too cinematically staged, especially in comparison with the more subtly terrifying scenes in Macedonia.