and Claire—this scorny French lady—
and in walks André.” Benjamin said,
“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know
who you are or what you want, but ev-
eryone is telling me I have to meet with
you and I’ve got to do this film.”
“They immediately hit it of,”
Dungey said. “I’m just sitting there, pick-
ing at grits. The purpose of the trip was
accomplished within thirty seconds.”
The only other people
in the restaurant were two
Gambian ladies visiting
from, of all places, the Cots-
wolds. “Why were they
there?” Dungey said. “I
don’t know. But, then again,
why were we there?
“Claire and André were
talking about eating snake,”
he continued. He shrugged
in a manner that suggested
his exclusion from the conversation had
been so profound as to be painless.
“Claire was saying how it gives you this
vitality, this life force. And one of these
women from Gambia turns around and
says, ‘She’s right!’ ”
Moments later, a statuesque woman
arrived. “She waltzes in and apparently
knows André,” Dungey said. “She hugs
him, asks how he’s been, blah, blah, blah.
This woman looks fantastic: she has rib-
bons in her hair, lots of beads, she’s col-
orfully dressed. André introduces her to
us as Dana.” Here Dungey paused,
smiled, and shook his head. “This is not
Dana. This is Queen Latifah.
“Claire is obviously taken with this
woman while having no idea who she
is. She just kept telling her she looked
like a queen,” he continued. (Denis in-
sists that she was well aware of Dana’s
identity.) “The ladies from Gambia know
who she is, though, and they also know
who André is, and they ask for a photo.
Queen Latifah ended up paying for all
our lunches without saying anything.”
Dungey added, “It was really one of
the most charming and weird moments
of my entire life.”C
laire Denis was eight weeks old
when she and her mother moved
from Paris to Cameroon, where her fa-
ther was serving as a French colonial ad-
ministrator. In the course of the next
thirteen years, the family expanded to
include several more children, and livedin territories that would become Mali,
Djibouti, and Burkina Faso. Denis’s par-
ents supported decolonization, and she
is adamant that “Chocolat” is not auto-
biographical. “My parents would cer-
tainly not have had someone serve them
meals. I wasn’t raised like that,” she told
me. “I was raised in a world that prob-
ably never actually existed, the world my
parents hoped for... where there was
no separation between peo-
ple. I was raised in a dream-
land.” Denis was at times
the only white child in her
class. “It was very embar-
rassing,” she said. “Not be-
cause I was white, but be-
cause I was not black.”
Like the space-born girl
in “High Life,” Denis grew
up knowing little about the
place her family came from.
They returned to France when Denis
was thirteen, after she and her sister con-
tracted polio. She has said that she ar-
rived “already nostalgic for another
world.” In Paris, she read the postcolo-
nial theorist Frantz Fanon’s masterpiece,
“The Wretched of the Earth.” The book,
written in the middle of the Algerian
war, argues that colonial subjects sufer
not just from material indignities and
humiliations but also, more painfully and
perversely, from an internalized inferi-
ority, which Fanon believed only vio-
lence could dismantle. Denis once said,
“When you are fourteen or fifteen and
you read ‘Les Damnés de la Terre,’ and
you’ve been raised in the midst of the
African colonies, it shocks you. Really,
that experience will stay with me for the
rest of my life.”
She left home at seventeen, married
a much older man, a photographer, and
moved to London. They separated after
a few years, but he encouraged her to re-
turn to Paris to study filmmaking at the
Institute for Advanced Cinematographic
Studies, the rigorous and highly techni-
cal film school where Louis Malle and
Alain Resnais were trained. After grad-
uating, in the early seventies, Denis began
a traditional apprenticeship, assisting
mostly on films shot in Paris.
Unlike her characters, who tend to
be laconic and aloof, and her narratives,
which are elliptical and enigmatic, Denis
speaks fluently, linearly, and sometimes
at great length, with an instinctual com-mand of pacing, foreshadowing, and sus-
pense. Much of what she said to me was
expressed in the form of stories, which
she delivered as if for the first time.
One winter, Denis said, she was liv-
ing alone in a sixth-floor studio apart-
ment “in a good district of Paris,” as she
put it, “not a poor little dimly lit street
in a vague suburb.” She was working on
a movie, and, after a long day, a co-
worker dropped her of at home. It was
freezing cold, she recalled, “and I was
wearing those eight clothes you wear
when you’re working nights in film.”
Beneath her military parka were three
sweaters and a large scarf.
When she reached her building, “I
went to the elevator, and I pressed the
button, and the elevator never arrived,”
she said. “So I opened the door to the
staircase and started climbing, and then
I realized the light in the staircase was
not functioning—but there was a win-
dow, and I knew my building by heart.”
She was between the second and third
floors when, “suddenly, somebody took
me by the hood of my coat, and I saw a
knife in front of my eyes and then saw
it come to my throat. And then very
quickly—you become Einstein at that
moment—I realized the elevator was
not working, the light was not working,
and now this knife: this is a setup.” Denis
went on, “I start talking to the guy, keep
pretending I was accepting.” He cut her
hand and told her he wanted to cut her
eyes. “I knew, all the time, if I lost con-
trol at that moment I was dead, or
wounded so bad it was the same. In the
end, after having accepted certain things,
I escaped him and ran to the sixth floor
with my bag, bleeding.” The man chased
her up the stairs but she made it into
her apartment.
“It took me one or two hours before
I could call the police,” she continued.
“My nervous system had done so much.”
They took her to the station, where, she
said, the oicer who helped her file a
report commented, “ ‘I don’t know what
you’re doing in your life to be out at
1 A.M., wandering alone... I have to
tell you, if you were my daughter, I would
have preferred that my daughter accept
to be killed than to be sullied.’ ” Denis
“realized that no one believed in my
dignity, in my strength, in my lucidity,”
she said. The last time she saw the oicer,
she said to him, “In a way, you insulted