At the Cinema: White Material

White Material (Claire Denis/2009) France, Cameroon/106mins *****

One of the many highlights of Claire Denis' latest, White Material, is studying the multiple variations of frazzled emotion which emanate from Isabelle Huppert's endlessly watchable face as she frets and contemplates her future. Huppert can always be relied upon to give good visage in a film, and her first collaboration with Denis allows her plenty of valuable face time. (Although she's as often frenetically shot in motion, from behind or in profile.) Her character, coffee plantation manager Maria, struggles to retain her grip on business and family relations as an unspecified civil war breaks out in her region; militia patrol and rebel soldiers advance on the plantation as things rapidly fall apart. Never one for a typically linear approach, Denis shows events from Maria's perspective as she later returns to the plantation via bus; her flashbacks are shown as fractured and piecemeal. Denis' intricately diced-up narrative - co-written with French playwright Marie NDiaye - makes restrained and allusive comment on the complex arrangement of white populations within African countries. Denis drops the occasional concrete hint as to the social and political observations she wants to arouse - through half-heard dialogue or background detail - but the overall tone is suggestive. As ever, her indistinct, high-fevered and rhythmic imagery leads us to consider what deeper resonances the story contains.

It's a heady, visually irrational and at times perplexing film; with Denis I wouldn't want it any other way. The abstractions of her film worlds somehow make apt sense by the time they reach their destinations. But just don't ask me why or how; I like to let her films remain wide open, stay as endlessly hazy memories. White Material wondrously falls in line with disjointed, less cohesive work such as The Intruder (2004) and Trouble Every Day (2002) more than it does with last year's equally excellent, though arguably more fluid and relaxed, 35 Shots of Rum. But it also has a torrid atmosphere, a thick with off-kilter dread, that even surpasses 1999's white-hot Beau travail. (And the setting of course recalls her 1988 debut, Chocolat.) Many of the plot strands waywardly veer from the main focus on Maria to bring forward periphery characters and events - such as Isaach de Bankolé's injured revolutionary 'The Boxer', or her son Manuel's (Nicolas Duvauchelle) disturbing, revelatory sea change in the desert - but wind their way back toward Maria and the plantation for closure. But Denis is never not in control of her haywire directorial compass. The day I see an easily fathomable Denis film will be a disappointing one for sure. This is not to say that she's merely serving up another dose of predictably "difficult" art-filmmaking, however. She mines a singular path, but is never slipshod with her material, and still find ways to mess with the limits of what she can make the film frame do for her. Every one of her films is markedly different from the next; each new one contains the zest and openness of a first-time director.

The acting is uniformly good: Huppert, obstinate, strong-willed as Maria, is superb (I've rarely seen her less than). Watching her buzz distressingly from scene to scene, like someone constantly trying to shut off a raw nerve, is one of White Material's innumerable pleasures. Excellent, too, are Duvauchelle (whose desert epiphany is all the more dark for the way Denis silently tracks it and the manner in which Duvauchelle underplays it) and Christopher Lambert as Maria's ex-husband. Regular Denis cinematographer Agnès Godard is missing in action, but Yves Cape replaces her, and makes the warmth of the African setting (White Material was filmed in Cameroon) unimaginably chilly. And the music, by another Denis mainstay, Stuart Staples of the Tindersticks, is as good and as haunting as ever. Good work, yet again, Denis.

Top Ten Films of 2009 - #1: 35 Shots of Rum

35 Shots of Rum/35 rhums (Claire Denis) France, 100 mins.
with: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Grégoire Colin



A few years ago I watched Claire Denis' Beau travail (1999) and Trouble Every Day (2001) and was bowled over by both for wildly differing reasons: outwardly they couldn't seem more different from one another, but both explore human desire and the need to possess and define others in bold, evocative ways; they are two of her very bests films. Between those two and 35 Shots of Rum, I didn't get the opportunity to see much of her work (on the whole her films tend to get limited releases here in the UK - mostly confined to London and the bigger cities). So when 35 Shots appeared at my local arthouse cinema I took the opportunity to catch it. I'm glad I did as it turned out to be my #1 film of 2009. It's an intimate, fascinating and exemplary film, full of many great moments of warmth, subtle human connection and vibrancy - it's simply filmmaking of the highest order. About two-thirds of the way into it, one scene set in a café (see below) convinced me that it was special. It confirmed that there's something indefinably unique and extraordinary in the way Denis films people merely existing, moving about in their own corners of the world.

Its simple narrative involves widowed train driver Lionel (Alex Descas) who shares a flat with his student daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop) on the outskirts of Paris. Ever since Lionel's wife died the father and daughter have lived harmoniously together in the apartment block; two neighbours Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a taxi driver who has long held a candle for Lionel, and Noé (Grégoire Colin), a longtime friend of Joséphine's living in his deceased parents' flat, and who is secretly in love with her, provide them with close company. But there's a feeling that it's time for this set-up to end, or at least drastically change for the four of them. Over a period of several weeks (though it may be less, days even - timescales are gloriously hazy at best in Denis' films) these four drifting characters, plus the friends and strangers they meet, experience events both minor and major and gradually arrive at some truths about where they are and where they are going in their lives.



Momentous events in the characters' lives aren't depicted as any more or less significant than the smaller, more day-to-day events, however. A gift of a rice cooker or smoking a cigarette on the balcony of a flat are given as much - or maybe, discreetly, a little more - weight as Joséphine's eventual marriage to Noé or the suicide of Lionel's work colleague René (Julieth Mars Toussaint). Marriage, death, dancing, smoking, the giving and receiving of gifts are all levelled to the same plane: the grand and the matter-of-fact - sometimes easefully, sometimes problematically - co-exist at the same time, on the same day. This doesn't infer a stoic neutrality within the film's narrative, but an intuitive awareness that, simply, life is one continuous series of everyday shifts - meetings, departures, realisations and goodbyes - up and down, both accordant and disruptive. Denis has mastered such intricate expertise of her craft incrementally over her previous films and it's perhaps never been better delineated than in 35 Shots (well, to date anyhow). Her fluent, almost non-verbal knowingness in interpreting the complex tangles of human engagement is near unmatched in cinema. Nothing is overtly spelt out in any solidly tangible way, though with a little legwork it becomes endlessly involving. More than one viewing of 35 Shots - or indeed any of her films - is ideal and something to look forward to.

Above all, Denis captures with ease that beautifully languorous feeling of nocturnal endlessness - a night out without rules or definitions. The closing scene of Beau travail, where Denis Lavant frenetically writhes alone on the dancefloor to Corona's 'Rhythm of the Night', felt as if it could've easily lasted forever; and the early evening traffic jam that spontaneously results in a long night of passionate abandon for Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon in Vendrei soir/Friday Night (2002) felt as if it happened at half the speed of the rest of the nightowls of Paris. Night time is Denis time. And here one of 35 Shot's pivotal and most wondrous scenes occurs at night: during an aborted trip to a gig (Gabrielle's taxi breaks down) the foursome end up seeking respite, and shelter from rain, in an after hours café; inside they are warmly met and are served food and drinks and music is played.



This scene sees the four almost wordlessly interact in a way they haven't before and arrive at truthful realisations about each other: they dance (Lionel with the beautiful proprietress of the café, then with Gabrielle; Noé with Joséphine) to the Commodores' Nightshift', then sit, together or separately, with each silently acknowledging the minute changes taking place in their relationships. It's a simple, deftly orchestrated scene (and possibly trickier to accomplish then it appears), that tells us so much about these people we've been spending the last hour with. The occasion of an impromptu night out, surrounded by people who work and play - and perspire with exhausted longing through both - creates in these characters the sudden whim to let on covertly what's going on, although with each not knowing what they'll be doing in ten minutes time, let alone the next day. The experience they were meant to have is happening elsewhere, but what they really want, the wonder of possibility, is right here. It's conducted as an accident with destiny.

Since seeing 35 Shots I spent time catching up on Denis' previous work that I'd missed: Friday Night (mentioned above), Chocolat (1988) and The Intruder/L'intrus (2004) were all equally as splendid, as are all her other films I've seen. She has shaped a body of work containing various themes, genres, ideas and tones, yet they are each one singularly hard to define. It's difficult to position her films to fit one all-encompassing pattern or motif. This reason, above many, is why she is one of today's most significant filmmakers; her films simply dwell longer in the mind than many others'. It's rare to find another contemporary filmmaker who uses core filmmaking elements in quite the same way she does, especially music and cinematography - care of her regular collaborators Stuart Staples (of the Tindersticks) and DoP Agnès Godard, respectively. The subtly muted colour palette stands out without being overtly highlighted, whilst also blending seamlessly into the environments of the characters (the inky early evening light cast over the train tracks where Lionel works, the dulled reds and blues of bedsheets, the interior of the after hours café aglow with life, and so on), and the affective score is nicely reverberant from scene to scene, and is nearly as intoxicating as the thought aroused by the film's title.



I'm in no doubt that this is one of the best films of last, or any, year. Everything about it works. The way Denis focuses on the tiny, apparently superfluous moments before or after significant events pleasantly sets it apart from many other, perhaps similar and more easily fathomable, family-centred mainstream films. She knows that the everyday instances of hard-won affection are, in the end, more meaningful on a personal level than the defining public occasions. But it's the particular way in which she portrays them - sometimes skewed, sometimes openhanded, but always honestly - that gives a film like 35 Shots of Rum its delightful, lasting potency. As Lionel says, after the wedding at the end of the film when Gabrielle asks him why he insists on drinking the thirty-five shots of rum: "It's an old story." We never discover the true implication behind the title of the film, but we somehow know why he finally allows himself his own personal celebration: it's the right way to let the story end.

That's one way of looking at 35 Shots, but here's another one - courtesy of this nice lady, who is far more concise about it than I was. (I really love what she says and like the way she becomes visibly more thoughtful and affected by it the more she talks about it.)



And here's the Commodores' wonderful song 'Nightshift'. (I had to include it since I went on about it so much.)

50 Great Films Seen in 2009

Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur's excellent Out of the Past (1947).
The most recent film noir to go into my all-time favourites list

I wanted to chalk up a list of films, both feature length and short, out of the 322 that I saw for the first time in 2009 (and that weren't new releases during the year), which I considered to be my favourites of the bunch - or simply great examples of surprising, bold, enjoyable, moving or just exemplary filmmaking. There are 50 films in total, listed alphabetically - all of them worth every minute of my, or indeed anybody's, time.

English language, or most frequently used titles, are in bold; country of origin or significant alternative titles are in italics, followed by directors names and year in parenthesis.

All the World's Memory Toute la mémoire du monde (Alain Resnais/1956) * (s)

Axe Lisa, Lisa (Frederick R. Friedel/1977)
Beyond the Door 2 Shock/Schock (Mario Bava/1979)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang/1953) *
Bread and Roses (Ken Loach/2000)
Calais: The Last Border (Marc Isaacs/2003) (s)
The Cameraman's Revenge Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora (Wladyslaw Starewicz/1912) (s)
Celine and Julie Go Boating Céline et Julie vont en bateau - Phantom Ladies Over Paris (Jacques Rivette/1974)
Chocolat (Claire Denis/1987)
Deep Red Profondo rosso (Dario Argento/1975) *
Doll Clothes (Cindy Sherman/1975) (s)
Elephant (Alan Clarke/1989) * (s)

Eyes of Laura Mars (Irvin Kershner/1978)
Farewell My Lovely Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk/1944)
Felicia's Journey (Atom Egoyan/1999)
The Firm (Alan Clarke/1988)
Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock/1972)
Friday Night Vendredi soir (Claire Denis/2002) *
Go West (Edward Buzzell/1940)
Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple/1976)
The House by the Cemetery Quella villa accanto al cimitero (Lucio Fulci/1981) *
House of Bamboo (Sam Fuller/1955)
The House of Clocks La casa nel tempo (Lucio Fulci/1989)
Interiors (Woody Allen/1978)
Julia (Erick Zonca/2008)
Late Spring Banshun (Yasujiro Ozu/1949) *
Lift (Marc Isaacs/2001) * (s)

Love and Death (Woody Allen/1975) *
Maniac (William Lustig/1980)
The Naked City (Jules Dassin/1948)
Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer/1964) *
On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray/1952) *
Out of the Past Build My Gallows High (Jacques Tourneur/1947) *
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick/1957)
Patrick (Richard Franklin/1978) *
Presto (Doug Sweetland/2008) (s)
The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola/1969) *

Sleepless Non ho sonno (Dario Argento/2001)
The Son Le fils (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne/2002) *
Squirm (Jeff Lieberman/1976)
The Stendhal Syndrome La sindrome di Stendhal (Dario Argento/1996)
Stereo (David Cronenberg/1969) (s)
Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster/1940)
The Swimmer (Frank Perry/1968) *
Torso I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (Sergio Martino/1973)
12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet/1957)
Unrelated (Joanna Hogg/2008)
The Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker/1973) *
The Virgin Spring Jungfrukällan (Ingmar Bergman/1960) *
The Young Girls of Rochefort Les demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda/1967)

* denotes potential titles for my personal all-time best/favourite films list.
(s) denotes a short film

Looking back to 2000: Films and performances

Female Performances:

01. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Donna De Angelo in Limbo
02. Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen/Mrs. Chan in In the Mood for Love
03. Kerry Washington as Lanisha Brown in Our Song
04. Melora Walters as Claudia Wilson Gator in Magnolia
05. Julianne Moore as Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair
06. Carrie-Anne Moss as Natalie in Memento
07. Catherine Keener as Maxine Lund in Being John Malkovich
08. Mira Sorvino as Dionna in Summer of Sam
09. Cate Blanchett as Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr. Ripley
10. Melanie Griffith as Honey Whitlock in Cecil B. DeMented

Also good, in no order: Chloë Sevigny Boys Don’t Cry / Tracey Ullman Small Time Crooks / Annette Bening American Beauty / Björk Dancer in the Dark / Sigourney Weaver Galaxy Quest

Male Performances:

01. Eric Bana as Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read in Chopper
02. Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho
03. Billy Crudup as FH in Jesus' Son
04. Forest Whitaker as Ghost Dog in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
05. John C. Reilly as Officer Jim Kurring in Magnolia
06. Michael Douglas as Prof. Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys
07. Tony Leung Chiu Wai as Chow Mo-wan in In the Mood for Love
08. Denis Lavant as Galoup in Beau travail
09. Albert Finney as Ed Masry in Erin Brockovich
10. John Leguizamo as Vinny in Summer of Sam

Also good, in no order: Mike White Chuck & Buck / Jack Black High Fidelity / David Strathairn Limbo / Ewen Bremner Julien Donkey-Boy / Jim Carrey Man on the Moon

Top Ten Films:

10. Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scorsese/USA)
09. Summer of Sam (Spike Lee/USA)
08. In the Mood for Love/Fa yeung nin wa (Wong Kar-wai/Hong Kong, France)
07. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch/France, Germany, USA, Japan)
06. Blackboards/Takhté siah (Samira Makhmalbaf/Iran, Italy, Japan)
05. Jesus' Son (Alison Maclean/Canada, USA)
04. Beau travail (Claire Denis/France)
03. American Psycho (Mary Harron/USA)
02. Limbo (John Sayles/USA)
01. Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson/USA)

Also good, in no order: One Day in September (Kevin Macdonald) / Our Song (Jim McKay) / High Fidelity (Stephen Frears) / The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan) / Chuck & Buck (Miguel Arteta) / Wisconsin Death Trip (James Marsh) / Small Time Crooks (Woody Allen) / Ringu/The Ring (Hideo Nakata) / Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter/Ash Brannon/Lee Unkrich) / Chopper (Andrew Dominik)

Looking back to 2002: Films and performances

Female Performances:

01. Naomi Watts as Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Dr.
02. Stockard Channing as Julie Styron in The Business of Strangers
03. Helen Mirren as Mrs. Wilson in Gosford Park
04. Shiang-chyi Chen as Shiang-chyi in What Time Is It There?
05. Uma Thurman as Amy Randall in Tape
06. Mania Akbari as the Driver in Ten
07. Cate Blanchett as Philippa in Heaven
08. Samantha Morton as Morvern Callar in Morvern Callar
09. Emily Watson as Elsie in Gosford Park
10. Béatrice Dalle as Coré in Trouble Every Day

Also good, in no order: Marcia Gay Harden Pollock / Fanny Ardant 8 Women / Barbara Hershey Lantana / Maribel Verdú Y tu mamá también / Anjelica Huston The Royal Tenenbaums

Male Performances:

01. Martin Compston as Liam in Sweet Sixteen
02. Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums
03. Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton in Minority Report
04. Timothy Spall as Phil in All or Nothing
05. Samuel L. Jackson as Doyle Gipson in Changing Lanes
06. Bill Nighy as Dan in The Lawless Heart
07. Paul Dano as Howie Blitzer in L.I.E.
08. Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson in 24-Hour Party People
09. Chiwetel Ejiofor as Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things
10. Robin Williams as Seymour Parrish in One-Hour Photo

Also good, in no order: Jake Gyllenhaal Donnie Darko / Stefano Cassetti Roberto Succo / Moritz Bleibtreu Das Experiment / Heath Ledger Monster’s Ball / Owen Wilson The Royal Tenenbaums

Top Ten Films:

10. My Little Eye (Marc Evans/UK, USA, France, Canada)
09. The Lawless Heart (Tom Hunsinger/Neil Hunter/UK, France)
08. Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis/France, Germany, Japan)
07. 28 Days Later... (Danny Boyle/UK)
06. Gosford Park (Robert Altman/UK, USA, Italy)
05. Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach/UK)
04. What Time Is It There?/ Ni na bian ji dian (Tsai Ming-Liang/Taiwan, France)
03. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami/Iran, France, USA)
02. Minority Report (Steven Spielberg/USA)
01. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch/USA)

Also good, in no order: Abouna (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) / The Business of Strangers (Patrick Stettner) / Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly) / Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsey) / The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson) / L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta) / All or Nothing (Mike Leigh) / Changing Lanes (Roger Michell) / Tape (Richard Linklater) / Talk to Her/Hable con ella (Pedro Almodóvar)

Very Good Work: Beau travail (Claire Denis/1999)

A while back I watched my first two films by two of France’s most celebrated and polemical female filmmakers, Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis: Anatomy of Hell/Anatomie de l'enfer (2003) and Beau travail/Good Work (1999), respectively. I saw them a few days apart, and whilst they didn’t have an enormous amount of clear-cut commonalities, they do share some ideological concerns. I guess I couldn’t help but view them as counterpart works in some respects.

An apparent connection I found when watching them consecutively – apart from the fact both are fascinating films from the controversial doyenne-duo of French cinema, and likewise ripe for analysis – prompted me to view them as near similitude to each other. Seeing them in such close proximity cemented the fact that both films are essentially about looking, above all else; specifically, they focus on how other people look at other people (and we looking at them both). But while Anatomy was a rather hollow exercise rammed forth with pretentious impassivity and muddied visual bluntness, Denis’ film was all fleshy cogitative swagger, enhanced by a crisply aerated clarity of image. Beau travail was also the sharper of the two in terms of what it means to be repulsed and fascinated at the same time by an exotic other. It burrowed a bit deeper. Further comparisons may or may not exist, other than the notion of visual (dis)pleasure, but Denis' was by far the better work. The act of looking is more evocatively investigated; its images have a lasting impact.

It’s indeed a handsome film to look at in formal terms. Denis’ favoured cinematographer, Agnès Godard, provides Denis’ camera a languorous and analogical look at male beauty and weakness, as filtered through its main character’s (Galoup, Denis Lavant) mostly idealised recollections. He narrates the story of his time spent in the French Foreign Legion, situated in the Gulf of Djibouti in Africa, where he leads the troops in training. Endless shots of bare-chested men running, mock-fighting and sweating through assault courses are frequent.



Denis’ camera adores these men. She tracks them in their daily grind at every juncture; the camera practically caressing their bodies as they train. From early on it’s evident that Denis is gradually developing an erotic fascination that is both incredibly distanced (in formal terms; her camera is physically at a remove from her subjects) and unfalteringly intimate at the same time (intimacy through the sense of sight alone). We know exactly how athletic each man is, how their bodies contort and their muscles flex, but we never really hear them talk, apart from snatched moments of idle conversation – It’s as if Denis is disallowing us any verbal distraction from the imagery; she’s nudging us to get our eyes to do the heavy lifting.

But if we don’t know much about the men’s inner lives, it’s because Lavant isn’t interested in them, not Denis. Events are somewhat skewed through his selective memory. That is, apart from his fixation on Sentain (Gregoire Colin) a soldier who inflames his repressed lust and occupies his singular gaze; this infatuation is a result of envy mixed with his craving the attentions of Commander Forestier (Michel Subor). Lavant is clearly in love with Sentain, and his strange and unjust treatment of him speaks volumes about the hierarchy of power these men adhere to. It’s very much about unspoken desire, of course, but we can’t seem to access it, just as Lavant can’t, or won’t, accept his feelings on any level apart from through the cruelty of furtive (though infertile) glances. But to say this is all surface longing is wrong, as what we can’t glean from the characters themselves, we piece together through the way in which Denis films them.

Landscape plays an important part in the film, too. Denis grew up in Africa (though now works out of Paris) and she clearly knows the setting well; the imagery is grounded by a great sense of place, and is as assured as it is oddly surreal. The land seems to stretch far and wide and it meets the tip of the ocean, which affords the film many shots of rampant skinny-dipping – this made me think that Denis was trying to trump Derek Jarman by one-upping his Sebastiane (1976).



Wet bodies don’t seem to interest her as much as hard bodies though. In training – usually on the seared deserts – the men hurriedly and quietly go about their procedures. The camera gets close enough to observe all the minute intricacies of their actions, but never opens up specific, logical avenues for us to see it extended beyond preordained and coded sexualised activity. It’s all pent up emotion, with little, or no, outlet. All this endless exercise is the calm before the storm, so to speak. It’s amazing how captivating it can be; there’s rarely a moment of boredom at any point. The languid rhythm of the editing mimics the men’s bodily movements. We’re lulled into a daze of oddly calm gestures, which are all the more strange because of the submerged levels of aggression they contain. These men respect one another – as comrades do – but there’s no obvious closeness. Denis does all the real bonding here, while we watch with inquisitive eyes.

And in contrast to all the gently swaying bodies in states of exertion, Lavant’s odd, spasmodic and downright fucked up dancing to Coronia’s 'The Rhythm of the Night' in the very final scene of the film is both hilariously baffling and strangely poignant all in one. In this last moment of acting out, both Denis and her main character do eventually achieve some kind of emotional release.

© Craig Bloomfield 2008