[Archives from 10/97-3/11]Claire Denis’ personal history as the oldest child of a colonial official stationed throughout outposts in French equatorial Africa is a biographical detail that is often only referenced within the context of her debut feature, Chocolat – a domestic situation that mirrored the filmmaker’s young life (that, as author Judith Mayne accurately points out, often… read more »
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… read more »
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… read more »
Histoire d’eaux (Bernardo Bertolucci) A whimsical, cross-cultural melding of east meets west romantic comedy presented in highly fractured (if unremarkable) ellipses that chronicle the couple’s chance encounter, marriage, extramarital temptation, and bizarre separation. About Time 2 (Mike Figgis) Multichannel split screening in the vein of Timecode, sometimes converging towards the encounter, other times intersecting… read more »
An early episode in Nenette and Boni shows a teenaged girl named Antoinette (Alice Houri), wearing an oversized shirt as she blissfully floats in a school gymnasium swimming pool before being summoned out of the water for improper swimming attire by an impatient instructor. Later in the evening, she bids an affectionate farewell to her… read more »
On her way to Paris, an attractive, young Lithuanian woman named Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva) scans through the local radio stations in search of ambient driving music, distractedly tuning in on a trivialized, inappropriately jovial news broadcast of the latest victim of the elusive “granny killer”, before resuming the station’s youthful, upbeat music programming. The film… read more »
On desolate road near the Spanish-French border, a pensive African immigrant from Benin, Dah (Isaach De Bankolé), waits in the darkness for a poultry truck to arrive for an appointed evening rendezvous. Aboard is an old friend, Jocelyn (Alex Descas) who has recruited him to act as an intermediary and handle the business affairs of… read more »