Claire Denis

  • Claire Denis – White Material (2009)

    2001-2010Claire DenisDramaFrance

    Quote:
    A textured panorama of modern day Africa’s dynamic and volatile cross-cultural landscape, Claire Denis’s White Material is an abstract and elemental, if oddly sterile rumination on colonial legacy and socioeconomic stagnation. Unfolding in episodic flashbacks as second-generation coffee plantation owner, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) scrambles to make her way back home after a forced evacuation of European settlers in light of an escalating civil war, the film structurally interweaves the parallel lives of the Vial family, a band of roving child soldiers scouring the countryside for “white material” trophies from fleeing settlers, and a charismatic military officer turned rebel leader known as the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) who has gone into hiding to recover from injuries sustained during a recent skirmish.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – Un beau soleil intérieur AKA Let the Sunshine In (2017)

    Drama2011-2020Claire DenisFranceRomance

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    Quote:
    The movie begins with a startling, intimate sex scene. A hefty middle-aged man is making love with an attractive middle-aged woman. He is avidly concerned with bringing her to orgasm, each one worries that the other is worried that the other is taking too long—“I feel good. I’m good,” insists one of them— the sex ends in resignation. What’s startling about the scene is not its explicitness, which is not inordinate. It’s the way the characters are framed, in medium closeup, in compositions that emphasis the space between their faces as much if not more than their faces. (One is reminded of Elie Faure’s writing on Velasquez, quoted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou.”)Read More »

  • Claire Denis – Les salauds AKA Bastards (2013)

    2011-2020ArthouseClaire DenisDramaFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    The world of Claire Denis’s Bastards is one of nightmarish inversion, where compassion has no place and connection only breeds despair. Structured around the fracturing of two family units, one irreparably shattered, one holding firm despite intense pressure, it imagines life as a steady succession of denials, duty waging a futile struggle against desire. In this reckoning every image grows twisted, the seductive mirage of a naked woman in high heels soon tarnished by the blood trickling down her legs. Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – Nénette et Boni AKA Nenette and Boni (1996)

    1991-2000ArthouseClaire DenisDramaFrance

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    Synopsis wrote:
    Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents’ divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There’s a problem that they must confront.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – L’intrus AKA The Intruder [+Extras] (2004)

    2001-2010Claire DenisDramaFrancePhilosophyPhilosophy on Screen

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    L’Intrus opens to a shot of the Franco-Swiss border as a border guard performs a customs check and inspection of a random vehicle with the aid of a contraband-sniffing dog. The seemingly mundane image of frontier, wilderness, and deception provides a curiously appropriate introduction into the Claire Denis’ impenetrably fractured, enigmatically allusive, otherworldy, and indelible metaphysical exposition into the mind of an emotionally severe, morally bankrupt, and profoundly isolated heart transplant patient named Louis (Michel Subor). Idiosyncratically unfolding in elliptical, often reverse chronology (with respect to the heart surgery) through the lugubriously fluid intertwining of Louis’ alienated existence and deeply tormented subconscious, the film is a fragmented and maddeningly opaque daydream (or perhaps more appropriately, a haunted nightmare) of the price exacted by his disreputable past, estranged relationships, hedonism, and instinctual quest for survival: his inability to reconcile with his only son and his family; his sexually motivated, yet emotionally distant relationship with a materialistic pharmacist; his dubious, transcontinental past (a suppressed history that may have included murder). Perpetually followed by a beautiful, enigmatic sentinel (Katia Golubeva) – or conscience – who seems to have been instrumental in obtaining his new heart, what emerges is an indelible, elegiac, and poetically abstract dreamscape through the wondrous, alien terrain of unreconciled (and irreconcilable) personal history, unrequited longing, and haunted memory.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – Beau travail AKA Good Work (1999)

    1991-2000Claire DenisDramaFranceQueer Cinema(s)

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    Quote:
    This film focuses on an ex-Foreign Legion officer as he recalls his once glorious life, leading troops in Africa.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – Vers Mathilde (2005)

    2001-2010ArthouseClaire DenisFrancePerformance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Vers Mathilde (Towards Mathilde)
    France | 2005 | 84mins | col | dir. Claire Denis, with Mathilde Monnier

    Mathilde Monnier is more than France’s foremost contemporary choregrapher. An explorer of the thorny fields of post-modern theory she has acquired a reputation as a kinetic investigator par excellence. More than just a documentary, this parallel triggered between Claire Denis’s work explores the birth, formulation and performance of a radical new dance piece.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – Les salauds aka Bastards (2013)

    2011-2020Claire DenisDramaFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Plot / Synopsis
    Supertanker captain Marco Silvestri is called back urgently to Paris. His sister Sandra is desperate – her husband has committed suicide, the family business has gone under, her daughter is spiralling downwards. Sandra holds powerful businessman Edouard Laporte responsible. Marco moves into the building where Laporte has installed his mistress and her son. But he hasn’t planned for Sandra’s secrets, which muddy the waters…Read More »

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