The New Yorker - May 28, 2018

32 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2018

The attention Denis pays her actors is an absorption that resembles love.

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

UNBREAKABLE

The fearless cinema of Claire Denis.

BY ALICE GREGORY

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL ROUSTEAU

O

ne night many years ago, a French

family was driving through the

North Region of Cameroon when they

ran out of gas. As they scrambled to

refill the tank, the car was surrounded

by a pride of lions. To protect their

young daughter, the parents locked her

in a metal trunk. The animals circled

the vehicle continuously, and to dis-

tract herself from danger the girl re-

peated her own name. Over the years,

the story of the little blond French girl

besieged by lions became something

of a legend in the area. It was said by

some that she had survived for fifteen

days under the hot African sun.

Decades after the story first circu-

lated, the little girl returned to Cam-

eroon from Paris, where she had come

of age. She was still small, and her hair

remained blond, but she was now in

her sixties. She had become a director

and was there to work on a feature film.

Sometimes, when scouting locations in

the bush with her camera-laden crew,

she would come upon locals and in-

troduce herself. “Oh, but it’s you,” they

would say. “The girl with the lions.”

Only as an adult did Claire Denis

realize that she hadn’t been afraid of the

lions all those years ago. She suspects

that she was too young to be frightened,

she has said, and remembers instead a

feeling of calm remove from the world,

as though she were “in a diferent time

frame.” She recalls how the animals,

aglow in the headlights, appeared pale,

almost white. “I thought it was the most

beautiful sight,” she told me. She rolled

her hips from side to side. “They were

so cool and so slow.”

The incident could be a scene from

one of Denis’s films. The dialogue is

sparse, and the cast of characters is lim-

ited. The themes are there, too: the re-

fusal of victimhood, the embrace of sol-

itude amid chaos, and race as an

unremarked on but glaring element of

a situation that is easy to imagine but

impossible to fully explain.

“Chocolat,” Denis’s first feature, from

1988, was also shot in Cameroon. It tells

the story of a complicated friendship

between a white girl, named France,

and Protée, her family’s black adult ser-

vant, in the years leading up to the coun-

try’s independence, in 1960. Protée is

France’s only companion, and through

their asymmetrical alliance we feel the

creeping evil of colonialism. Like water,

it finds its way into even the most hid-

den interpersonal crevices, which no

amount of good will or innocence or

even love can caulk. In almost every

shot, Denis acknowledges the cultivated

ignorance and cruel indiference of

whiteness. Protée rarely speaks, and in

one scene, in which he serves dinner,

the camera cuts of his body at the neck.

Denis has said, of “Chocolat,” “I think

I had a desire to express a certain guilt

I felt as a child raised in a colonial world.”

Denis’s films can be hard to find in

the United States, but she is beloved by

many young American filmmakers for,

among other things, her artful confron-

tations with race. Barry Jenkins, the di-

rector of “Moonlight,” which won last

year’s Academy Award for Best Picture,

told me, “I get the sense that she truly

just doesn’t give a shit, that it doesn’t

occur to her that she shouldn’t be ‘al-

lowed’ to handle this material. It’s not

a foreign world to her, in a way it might

appear to be when you look at her and

see a white Frenchwoman.” He contin-

ued, “You watch ‘Chocolat,’ and it’s re-

markable. This is a first movie by some-

one who has not one question about

what her rights are as a storyteller.”

Since “Chocolat,” Denis has directed

a handful of shorts and documentaries

and a dozen feature films. These include