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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]