a drama about cockfighting in Paris (“No
Fear, No Die,” 1990); a vampire thriller
that French audiences booed for its ex-
treme violence and deviant sexuality
(“Trouble Every Day,” 2001); and a
dreamy reimagining of the philosopher
Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of his heart
transplant, shot in locations including
Tahiti and Switzerland (“The Intruder,”
2004). “White Material,” released in the
U.S. in 2010, was many Americans’ in-
troduction to Denis’s work. A sort of
companion piece to “Chocolat,” it tells
the story of a Frenchwoman, played by
Isabelle Huppert, who refuses to leave
her family’s cofee plantation in an un-
named African country, despite the rebel
violence erupting just outside its walls.
Denis’s films are filled with lush scenes
of the natural world—African deserts,
snowy Alpine fields, and the mineral-
green waters of the South Pacific—and
characters who tend to reveal themselves
not through dialogue but through how
they move and look. Alex Descas, one
of the actors with whom Denis has
worked longest, and who credits her with
writing complicated, realistic roles for
black actors at a time when few others
did, described her artistic mode suc-
cinctly: “Film is not theatre,” he told me.
Last month, at a screening of her latest
movie, “Let the Sunshine In,” at the IFC
Center, in Manhattan, Denis said, “I once
read that I like to film bodies. No! But,
if you choose someone, that person has
a body. They have feet, hands, hair, breasts,
ass—all of that is part of what is impor-
tant.” The film stars Juliette Binoche, as
a divorced painter who dates men she
shouldn’t: a married banker, a narcissis-
tic actor, a standoish curator. “She
wanted my character to be beautiful and
desirable and luminous,” Binoche told
me. In the final shot, the camera—which
one critic described as “smitten”—stays
on her smiling face, which is ablaze with
delusion and hope. Denis, according to
Binoche, “works like a portrait painter.”
Wesley Morris, a cultural critic for
the Times, compared Denis’s work to a
stew that’s been cooking all week—a re-
duced and potent pleasure. “My favorite
image in any of her movies, or maybe in
all movies, is from ‘The Intruder,’ ” he
said. He went on to describe the scene
in which Beatrice Dalle, who plays a dog
breeder living in the Jura Mountains, is
pulled by huskies through a snowy for-
est on a sled. “She’s in utter ecstasy,” he
said. “Very few women in the history of
cinema have ever looked that happy doing
anything.” Careening through the snow,
she shouts commands. “Faster!” she yells.
“Go, go, go, go, go!” Her grin is wide but
in flashes looks more like a grimace. As
with many of Denis’s heroines, and Denis
herself, the pleasure Dalle’s character ex-
periences is not far from fear.W
hen I met Denis in Paris, in late
March, it was just warm enough
to forgo a winter coat but still cold
enough to regret it. Denis, who turned
seventy-two last month and can’t weigh
much more than a hundred pounds,
wore stif selvedge jeans and a Levi’s
denim jacket buttoned all the way up,
like a tiny Edwardian greaser.
We walked from her editing suite,
in a newly gentrified neighborhood in
the Twelfth Arrondissement, to a bras-
serie down the street that she and her
producers rag on constantly but patron-
ize regularly. A recent throat surgery
had roughened Denis’s already gravelly
voice—it sounded at times as though
she were impersonating a sexily androg-
ynous Frenchwoman, instead of merely
being one.
Denis was carrying a backpack in lieu
of a purse, and she flung it carelessly into
the banquette. “Time is very slow and
yet very fast,” she said, without making
eye contact. “Astrophysicists say it does
not even really exist.” (We conducted all
our conversations in English, which
Denis speaks fluently, with some odd
turns of phrase.) She was in the final
weeks of editing “High Life,” her En-
glish-language début, about a band of
convicts sent into space to harvest en-
ergy from a black hole, and had resched-
uled our plans several times. I was left
with the impression of trying to coax,
cajole, and ultimately capture a partic-
ularly dexterous pet—and with the sense
that she felt my presence was a waste of
time, at a moment when she needed all
that she could get.
“High Life,” which cost millions more
to make than any of Denis’s previous
films, seems, on its surface, dramatically
divergent from the rest of her body of
work, yet versions of its premise swirled
inside Denis’s mind for more than a de-
cade. For years, she had wanted to tell
the story of the last person in the world.In the film, the galactic convicts perish
one by one. Only a single felon survives,
along with his daughter, who was born
on the spaceship. (Olafur Eliasson, the
Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist who
a decade ago erected waterfalls in the
East River, designed the spaceship for
the movie.) Their relationship—liter-
ally forged in a vacuum, with a whif of
the taboo—was her primary interest in
the story. “It’s feminine and masculine,”
Denis said. “It’s family blood but it’s not
the same sex.”
The script, which Denis wrote with
her longtime screenwriter, Jean-Pol
Fargeau, took years to complete. (Zadie
Smith and Nick Laird worked on a draft
that Denis ultimately rejected.) Though
Denis treats scripts as provisional and
merely suggestive documents, hers are
full of vivid sensory detail. When “High
Life” ’s main character, played by Rob-
ert Pattinson, is introduced, he is “pressed
against the exterior of the spaceship, like
a mountain climber against a sheer clif
face.” Later, when he changes out of his
spacesuit, he does so “like a knight re-
moving armor.”
Denis saw Pattinson in “Twilight,”
she said, and was struck by his “heart-
rending charisma.” She had wanted
someone older for “High Life”—she
thought at one point of Philip Seymour
Hofman—but after meeting with Pat-
tinson in Los Angeles and Paris she re-
alized that “he was already in the film.”
She went on, “When he said to me, ‘Are
you sure?’ I said, ‘It’s already too late.
It’s you or nobody else.’ ” She chose
“High Life” ’s other stars, including Ju-
liette Binoche and the English model
and actress Mia Goth, with similarly
instinctual possessiveness. In the sum-
mer of 2015, Denis and her producer,
Oliver Dungey, flew to Atlanta to meet
André Benjamin, the rapper, actor, pro-
ducer, adroit hat-wearer, and all-around
cultural icon, better known by his stage
name, André 3000, and for his flam-
boyant role in the Atlanta hip-hop duo
OutKast. Denis had enjoyed Benjamin’s
lead performance in “All Is by My Side,”
a 2014 bio-pic of Jimi Hendrix, and she
had got it in her mind that he should
play a part in “High Life.”
The three had agreed to meet at the
St. Regis Hotel’s restaurant for lunch.
“Here we are,” Dungey recalled, “me—
this sort of posh, square English guy—