There is a scene at the end of Claire Denis’s Chocolat in which three African men, working at an airport in Cameroon, load luggage into the belly of a plane. They ride the luggage cart out to a far end of the airport for a smoke break, chatting all the while. The camera shoots them from some remove, slowly moving in to a tighter shot as they take refuge from the ensuing rain under an overpass. One man takes a leak, and they all continue talking, but we don’t hear their conversation above the sound of Abdullah Ibrahim’s smooth, buoyant afro-jazz score.
Chocolat was Denis’s first film, and as such is often regarded as atypical of her work generally, but this scene falls in line with many similar final scenes in the films of her subsequent career. Nearly always slightly distanced from, if not completely unmotivated by, the foregoing narrative, sequences such as these seem to suggest a kind of liberation from the often violent emotional and sexual tension that precedes them. They suggest something—a sensibility, an emotion, a persistent narrative line—that the limited film narrative cannot itself fully contain or account for: Alice Houri’s plaintive enjoyment of a salvaged cigarette butt in Nénette et Boni; Denis Lavant’s superlative solo dance to Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night” in Beau travail; Béatrice Dalle’s euphoric dogsled ride in L’Intrus. In this light, Chocolat is not atypical of Denis at all, and its final sequence presages many such scenes in the director’s later work.
This finale is notable also for its resemblance to the work of another filmmaker: Jim Jarmusch. The trio of men, the laid-back camaraderie, the cool, casual laziness of everyday life made meaningful with just the right music: transported to Louisiana and transposed to black-and-white with audible dialogue, this could easily be one of many similar, lengthy sequence shots from Jarmusch’s Down by Law, the direction of which Denis assisted only two years earlier.
In this Shooting Down Pictures video essay, created for Reverse Shot’s 25th symposium, Claire Denis—The Art of Seduction, Kevin B. Lee takes on Denis’s most abstract film. Click here to read more from Lee about his beautiful, equally enigmatic work here, of which he writes: “My way to get at L’Intrus was to do an appreciation via video essay. What I didn’t expect was how difficult this film would be to penetrate and elucidate, especially in a video essay format. This is probably the most challenging time I’ve had with a video essay.” Thanks to Kevin for his contribution!
In visualizing lives on the margins as sensually as another filmmaker might the halls of Versailles or the lights of a shimmering Christmas tree, French director Claire Denis has positioned herself, in our eyes at least, among the first rank of international auteurs. She does something nearly unthinkable in a world cinema scene obsessed with provocateurs like Haneke and Von Trier: she chooses to please rather than pillory her audience, invite into a dialogue around images rather than read sermons from on high. Like her compatriot and contemporary Olivier Assayas, Denis seems to have decided that, in the long, long shadow cast over French cinema by Godard’s early output, the most radical thing to do is not to eschew or batter narrative, but to wrestle with and redefine it, all without losing sight of the essential satisfactions of storytelling. This isn’t to suggest her films are films are easy on the mind, though they are always easy on the eyes. Her camera doesn’t just capture; it caresses.
While rarely calling attention to her own impeccable craftsmanship, Denis has forged a personal, identifiable aesthetic that registers just as immediately as any of Godard’s more radical formal interventions—or Haneke’s still-life needlings, or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s roving historical investigations, for that matter. Unlike the similarly off-handed work of Assayas (whose everywhere-at-once approach to filmmaking was long ago feted with the patented Reverse Shot treatment), Denis’s personal cinema is a product of a kind of seductive minimalism. Her hovering camera, structured ellipses, and sensual employment of music produce a feeling of voluptuous grace hard to shake even when her films turn violent.
Like many others in the crowded Manhattan theater where I saw Gus Van Sant’s Milk, I was teary-eyed during the film’s emotional finale. Yet I still could not help but feel a certain ambivalence creeping inside me. The images were powerful: both staged reenactment and documentary footage of the thousands who marched, candles in hand, down Castro Street in memory of the slain Harvey Milk, the country’s first openly-gay public official. As a gay man who, like others, has found a certain amount of inspiration in the gumption, tenacity, and genuinely big-hearted spirit that Milk brought to his public life and service, the endless stream of flickering candles—conveying both the tragic delicacy of human life and the breadth of public solidarity of the deceased—struck a deeper chord in me than similar images in similar biopics have in the past. And yet this sense of familiarity never quite escaped me. I have seen images like these before in other movies about inspirational politicians or leaders or social rabble rousers who were slain while serving their cause. Such movies often end with a rousing speech given before a large crowd, or simply a parting shot of the thousands of anonymous faces whose lives were forever changed by the life and work of the film’s subject. By ending on this note of sober uplift, the film both enshrines its subject and comforts the viewer with community, ensuring that the tears shed within the movie theater are matched by those wept on screen.
And this kind of bothered me, for reasons that graft personal experience onto aesthetic quality. As the out-and-proud queer in me swooned at the experience of watching the story of a smart, funny, and lovable gay man achieve success and historical significance, told without apology or hand-wringing, the (queer) film lover in me naturally assumed that such a difference in content would be accompanied by rule-breaking choices in form. This expectation would seem partially justified by the involvement of Van Sant, a man who has proven he knows a thing or two about wedding queer experience with daring aesthetic strategies. When this didn’t happen—when Milk merely turned out to be a brilliantly acted, emotionally absorbing, and genuinely inspiring traditional biopic, and one of my favorite films of 2008—the problems of mixing one’s identity politics and cinematic evaluation inevitably crept in. Was I less skeptical of Milk’s relatively standard biopic tactics because of its message of hope and queer empowerment, or was I more skeptical because I wanted those messages to be delivered in a manner that matches their particular contours and rough edges? Well, yes and yes.
It’s the insufferable, overused-before-it-even-achieved-ubiquity buzzword of the moment: “Bromance.” Supposedly—and if so, fittingly—coined within the insecure macho skateboarding subculture of the mid-Nineties, the term is loaded with a defensive irony it vainly pretends to preemptively strike. By linking male friendship with romance the neologism at once mocks the “gayness” of open male affection and the perceived “gayness” of open male affection. It’s the perfect passive-aggressive salvo for the enlightened liberal homophobe.
I’m surprised more people haven’t called out the rampant idiocy of this word. “Bromance” doesn’t suggest our culture has become more comfortable about male bonding; instead its euphemistic qualities suggest a greater sense of embarrassment and self-consciousness about it. How is it that in 1941 Rick Blaine could, without a shred of sarcasm, tell Captain Renault, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—possibly the most famous line celebrating unromantic male companionship—while more than six decades and several gay rights campaigns later the straight male protagonist has become so increasingly anxious about being decoded and derided as gay that he consistently invents deflections, projections, and self-reflexive, self-deprecating jabs to make sure he never be accused of that.
Casablanca is an appropriate touchstone because “bromance” began its meme ascendancy in the movies. Even in the age of Madea, when non-white (specifically, black) audiences are gaining as much clout at the box office as white audiences, the movies are still a cultural bastion of white, heterosexual male privilege that constantly demonizes and mocks his various Others. From Some Like It Hot to Bachelor Party, film comedies have played a significant role in reinforcing that focal bugaboo of white male anxiety—homosexual panic—but what’s disconcerting is that the contemporary mainstream comedy is now the primary upholder of this fear. Where in the past the action movie and the psychological thriller were the two most popular venues for containing the threat of homosexuality—in the former through a “no sissies” macho heroism and in the latter through portraying gays as mentally deviant perverts—these genres are now transparent laughingstocks. Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin’s essay on I Love You, Man and the Apatow Comedy Factory, “Bromicide.”
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