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Identity Politics: Issues in the Films of
Claire Denis
By Travis MacKenzie Hoover
To the responsible critic, the films of Claire
Denis present an enormous conundrum. In her favour is her position
on the front lines of the previous century’s ideological collapse:
Like no other director, she shows life after the fall of the repressive
powers of colonialism in Chocolat (1988), S’en
fout la mort (1990) and Beau
travail (1999); communism in J’ai pas sommeil (1994); and the nuclear family in Nénette
et Boni (1996).
She is fiercely committed to the marginal characters populating
her films, and she is extremely compassionate in her detailing of
their lives as they struggle to pick up the pieces in the wake of
shattering changes. But her ideal solution to these problems is
far removed from a traditional leftist position. Lurking at the
edges of her frames is nostalgic regret—a yearning for the
comforting certainties that those now wasted, all-powerful ideologies
used to provide. And the matter is more complicated than a simple
choice of left or right.
There is the sense that Denis is foursquare for
the cultural identity of the oppressed: her early films paint dominant
regimes forcing their subjects into defensive positions, making
them cling desperately to their beliefs and practices so that they
might not be victimized further. And yet, she also seems to suggest
that identity and oppression complement each other. Empowerment
itself is suspect, as if those who create their identities out of
the ashes of empire are no better than the past emperors who restricted
them in the first place. This forces her films into the uncomfortable
position of affirming ethnic and social cohesion at the expense
of agency and self-determination; one can sympathize with the oppressed,
but one can never really release them from their plight. These complex
issues can only be understood through a close reading of the films,
all of which bear a simultaneous mistrust and acceptance of the
challenges of these post-ideological times.
At first, Denis’ debut feature, Chocolat,
would appear to be an open-and-shut case of colonial critique. There
is the unequal power relationship between a white master and a black
servant in 50s North Africa: specifically, that of Aimée
(Giulia Boschi), wife of a perpetually absent colonial administrator
in a remote outpost, and Protée (Isaach de Bankolé),
the black manservant who ministers to her and her young daughter,
France. Aimée is constantly taking out her loneliness and
sexual frustration on the servants, whipsawing between upfront domination
and passive aggression: She alternately lashes out when things don’t
go her way, and appeals for a surrogate husband when she needs protection.
Everything is casual, but the lines of power are clearly drawn—a
fact underlined by Denis’ habit of compositionally separating
lonely wife and faithful servant, compartmentalizing them in the
shapes of doors and hallways so that they never share the same field
of space, and thus, the same set of rules.
But what truly separates master from servant is
the ability of the master to shift the definition of his or her
identity. As various white guests tramp through Aimée’s
house, a strange discontent settles on them all: They are deathly
afraid that their identity will be contaminated by the presence
of blackness. Some, like a visiting British dignitary and a stranded
coffee plantation owner, make an enormous, defensive show of their
dominance so that they might feel more secure; some, like a disgruntled
ex-priest, choose to “go native” and live the disadvantaged
life of a servant, occasionally ordering such servants to reject
the power of the white elite. But whether they embrace the colonial
order or reject it, they at least acknowledge that it offers choice:
the choice to sustain or reject an identity, leading them to enormous
convolutions to justify the choices they make. Protée lacks
choice, and thus has the moral alibi of the powerless—an airtight
identity that can never change.
Making this distinction, Denis turns to testing
the possibility of communication between the two poles of identity
through the figure of France (Cécile Ducasse), whom she positions
on the border between her white ethnicity and fascination with the
black other. At first France views her mother and her guests through
a glass darkly, noting their hysteria and childishness, and apparently
disavowing it through her irreverent gaze; she also appears to have
a rapport with Protée, the servant with whom she has most
contact. But in the end, Denis decides that not only is this relationship
no real protest, but that protest itself is impossible. Aimée
makes advances to Protée; sturdy Protée rejects her,
ensuring that he will be cast out of the house. And when France
goes to Protée after his exile, he refuses to renew the friendship—instead
scalding her hand on a generator engine as a gesture of defiance.
Transgression on France’s part is futile, as it is merely
one more side of her whiteness, which the colonial subject must
reject.
One would expect from this synopsis that the elimination
of polymorphous whiteness would improve the lives of the colonial
subject. But the film’s framing device shows that power itself
is the factor that creates the moral blankness of fluid identity.
Returning to her decolonized home country, the adult France hitches
a ride with a black American tourist named William; he reveals that
instead of the welcoming African utopia he expected to find, he
was ripped off by the first cab driver he encountered. “I
really stayed an American,” adding, “if I died here,
I’d disappear forever.” Emancipation has led to the
same moral flexibility that marked the deposed colonial masters.
William’s oppression in America marks him, paradoxically,
as a higher caste than those living in Cameroon’s moral no
man’s land, who no longer have to answer to any sort of classifying
power and thus any moral absolutes. And so France’s attempts
to explore her roots are similarly frustrated: she never reaches
her lost home, while William’s reading of her scalded hand
reveals that she has been cursed to “no past [and] no future.”
S’en fout la mort offers the horror of cultural confusion
from the opposite angle: Instead of depicting a white girl looking
longingly at the coherent world of black Africans in Africa, it
presents a black man yearning for the acceptance of a scrambled
but powerful white family in France. The man in question is Jocelyn
(Alex Descas), a trainer of fighting cocks from the West Indies;
the family is the one that employs his services, headed by small-time
crime lord Ardennes (Jean-Claude Brialy), an older man who knew
(and perhaps slept with) Jocelyn’s mother. At stake is the
sanctity of cockfighting, which is Jocelyn’s livelihood and
a cultural touchstone—like him, a transplant from a distant
land that must be protected with monastic zeal. But as with Aimée’s
overtures towards Protée, Ardennes will tempt him to both
corrupt the rules of the game and symbolically join—at a disadvantage—the
family on which he is dependent.
Again Denis pits the cultural coherence of the
oppressed against the domineering heterogeneity of the colonial
oppressor. Ardennes’ clan is a morally fluctuating entity
without any real concern beyond immediate gratification: His young
wife Toni and his son are carrying on an affair, and Toni herself
is beginning to make advances towards Jocelyn. Thus it comes as
no surprise that Ardennes manipulates Jocelyn through his connection
with his mother: He assumes the role of a bullying parent, leaning
on Jocelyn to attach knives to the cocks’ legs. Tragically,
the tactic works: Jocelyn’s zeal for training gives way to
depression and apathy, as well as a yearning for the prize of white
princess Toni. And Toni’s attentions lead inexorably to his
doom, as he is killed while trying to lay claim to her against the
demands of Ardennes’ more powerful son.
If Jocelyn had choices, he’d be in a position
to determine his identity; he’d also be a bully like Ardennes,
and have a one-sided approach to how he maintained his power. The
counterpoint to the Jocelyn/Ardennes split comes in Dah (de Bankolé),
the business part of the cock-training team who acts as monetary
middleman. He takes an aloof approach to both Jocelyn’s training
and Ardennes’ marketing, spurning women like Toni as distractions
and viewing Ardennes’ manipulations as so much static from
those who would bend the odds to their will. However sturdy he is
in his convictions and identity, there’s no denying that he’s
at a disadvantage. Ardennes is as much the employer/colonist as
Chocolat’s Aimee; Dah ensures his identity by ensuring his
servitude, however much he might chafe at it. The film’s final
shot is Dah looking out of a taxicab that passes out of the frame;
it’s a poignant but resigned image, suggesting that defeat
is perhaps the only morally defensible position in a world of fluid
masters.
One can write off these early films’ fixed
subject/unfixed master dichotomy as illustrating the two-faced nature
of colonial subjugation. But by J’ai pas sommeil, Denis has
crossed a line that all but demands oppression for a stable identity.
Loosely based on an actual case, the film gives us a black character
named Camille (Richard Courcet) who has chosen an eccentric way
of refusing a colonial subjectivity: by becoming a gay androgynous
serial killer who stalks and robs elderly women. Making much ado
over his rejection of his Martinique origins, and noting that he
has a balding white lover/accomplice, Denis implies that his larcenous
will-to-power is the end result of rejecting the fixed identity
that he was handed. Recalling her approach to the hysterical identity
shifts of the earlier films’ colonialists, she points to Camille’s
black-whiteness (as well, to his sexual boundary crossing) as evidence
of a willful rejection of a traditionally delineated ethnic identity.
Camille attempts to seize power via the victimization of others,
reinforcing Denis’ assertion that power itself is a destabilizing
agent that is to be rejected at all costs.
By contrast, the characters that seek some firm,
non-hybrid identity are more sympathetic. Most important of these
is Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva), a refugee from Eastern Europe who
has driven to Paris to search for work. Briefly rooming with an
elderly relative, she answers the statement “that Perestroika,
I don’t know where it’s gotten you” with “nowhere”—and
demonstrates that one alternative to communist rule might be labouring
as a lowly chambermaid in a hotel where, coincidentally, Camille
and his lover reside. She’s already been screwed over by a
theatre director/lover who flippantly promised her a job that never
materialized, and thus has suffered as Protée and Jocelyn—under
the mercurial demands made on them by people who have the power
to remake themselves at will.
Similarly disadvantaged by Paris’ chaotic
nature is Camille’s brother, Theo (Descas), a mover who has
tried to make an interracial marriage work while putting up with
the menial victimization of his job. Having fled Martinique, he’s
increasingly weary of nickel-and-diming customers and increasingly
homesick. Unfortunately, he has a son with his white wife Mona (Béatrice
Dalle), who is loyal to her own ethnic origins and wants to stay
put. Thus the stage is set for an emotional tug-of-war between husband
and wife, who are at once sympathetically loyal to their own ethnic
origins but who prove totally incompatible. This proves to be the
flipside of Camille’s morally bankrupt dual ethnicity: two
different stable ethnicities, both on the side of right and yet
so completely incompatible, another attempt at hybridity gone painfully
wrong. The rueful conclusion is that differing stable identities
are incompatible; Theo and Mona’s only mistake was in trying
to merge two identities into one.
Thus, the film draws a painful symmetry between
the defiantly stable Theo and the soon-to-be corrupted Daiga—as
charted on the graph of the irredeemable Camille. Theo, predictably,
cuts his losses when presented with his brother as a cold-blooded
killer. After Camille has been finally captured, one of Theo’s
questioners comments, “If it had been my brother, I would
have known.” Theo’s response, “My brother is a
stranger, just like you,” damns both the murderer and the
fluid, unknowable city that encouraged him. But Theo is frustrated
in asserting himself, walking off into the distance without resolving
his impasse with Mona. Daiga, meanwhile, is more open to the city’s
ideal, if only to desperately transcend her fate. When Camille’s
face is splashed on wanted posters, she mysteriously begins to shadow
her inscrutable hotel guest. Once he’s been publicly revealed,
she takes a page from his book and raids his room, piles his stash
into her car, and flees. The lesson: one can be a beacon of cultural
identity, and a victim like Theo, or command the waters of indeterminacy
and be cut loose from moral bedrock. One cannot have both, and yet
the post-ideological age forces this impossible choice.
Having dealt with the collapses of colonialism
and communism, Denis turns in Nénette et Boni to the dissolution
of the nuclear family. In one corner, we find Boni (Grégoire
Colin), living in his dead mother’s house, keeping her memory
alive while loathing the sister and father who bailed. In the other
corner is that sister, Nénette (Alice Houri): she re-enters
her bitter brother’s world only after becoming pregnant by
an undisclosed party. Despite his yearning for stability, Boni’s
world would more accurately be described as chaotic: working, when
he feels like it, as a pizza maker and sometimes fence for stolen
goods. Nénette, meanwhile, was forced out of her comfortable
existence only by her pregnancy, and is prepared to sponge in order
to maintain the life to which she’s accustomed. Boni’s
is the fixed identity that exists in forced exile from stability
while Nénette represents the fluidity of those in power—though
as she falls from her comfortable existence, her identity will be
transfigured.
It’s Boni’s movie all the way. Denis
allows us to enter his thoughts in a way that leaves inscrutable
Nénette in the dust. From spoken journal entries to mumbled
sexual fantasies to strongly held opinions, the director gives us
numerous entry points for understanding Boni—who simply identifies
with the idea of family. Nénette, by comparison, is opaque
and mysterious, constantly viewed from afar, and seldom verbalizes
her feelings or motives. She’s not above flirtatiously manipulating
one of Boni’s housemates in order to gain access to the house,
and refuses to respect boundaries, choosing to write in her brother’s
journal. Boni is explained while Nénette is observed; he
is the one who clings to a stable identity in the face of total
chaos; she is the one, like the “stranger” Camille from
J’ai pas sommeil, who exploits situations to her advantage.
While it’s true that Nénette isn’t as demonized
as the other moral cripples in Denis’ cinema, it’s equally
true that Boni gets the last word. Disgusted by his sister’s
casting-off of her offspring, he goes to the hospital, kidnaps the
baby at gunpoint, takes him home—and never answers for what
he does. Denis appears to be in full agreement with her protagonist’s
decision to refuse his sister’s cutting of yet another family
bond; we are given an image of Boni doting on the infant, and then
an image of a chastened Nénette outside, perhaps for the
first time facing the prospect of something other than her own desires.
It’s a tenuous gesture, but in lieu of nothing else it has
to do.
In her acknowledged masterpiece, Beau
travail,
we find Denis at her most complex in exploring past powers and current
chaos. She finds a colonial relic in search of a purpose: a French
Foreign Legion base in Djibouti that has, in order to survive, reduced
itself to pure form. Enacting endless training exercises and going
on pointless missions in the desert, the legionnaires fulfil the
prophecy about colonial whites spoken of in Chocolat, possessing
“no past [and] no future,” and thus exist as an anachronism
in a North Africa where the locals regard these warriors as mere
spectacle to be viewed from a distance. But that spectacle allows
Denis to make abstract the legionnaires’ activities, lending
them the structure that their crumbled colonial motives no longer
provide. Ideology has collapsed into pictorialism: The function
of the Legion may be gone, but the myth of purposeful military honour
continues.
But even an abstract Legion has its factions. In
one corner of this Billy Budd rewrite is Claggart figure Galoup
(Denis Lavant), an officer who represents the traditional paranoia
of the colonial elite: It’s his job to infiltrate the identities
of the recruits and eliminate all that is not the Legion. Like the
colonists of Chocolat, he is afraid of any deviations that might
threaten his fragile idea of his identity: When a black soldier
expresses misgivings about a fellow black’s punishment, Galoup
tells him not to question because “you’re a legionnaire
now.” In the other corner is Billy stand-in Sentain (Colin),
who challenges the uniformity of the Legion by appealing to the
legionnaires’ personal traits, and represents values that
cannot be contained by the simple tag of “soldier.”
Uniquely in Denis’ cinema, the two points of view finally
challenge each other; instead of one rapaciously ravaging the other,
they lock horns as equals to test the viability of the French colonial
project.
Predictably, they cancel each other out. Galoup
becomes so consumed with jealousy that he contrives a plot to snare
Sentain: He trumps up charges of dereliction of duty on a black
legionnaire and punishes him with forced labour, knowing Sentain
will be easily provoked to violence. But Galoup’s retaliation
destroys both men. Leaving Sentain in the desert, he at once kills
(or at least loses) the representative of plurality and seals his
own doom with a court martial. The only character who truly believes
in the colonial mission is ironically cast out by a structure emptied
of meaning, leaving him to roam Marseilles wishing for the days
when, as his tattoo would have it, he could “serve the good
cause and die.” He’s at fault, and yet, also sympathetic,
as he stood for a fixed identity when everything was collapsing
into meaninglessness.
This brings us, after an interlude of two more
non-specific variations on her themes, to Denis’ latest film,
L’intrus, which offers a crucial distinction between its main
source (Jean-Luc Nancy’s memoir) and filmic interpretation.
Nancy’s short work deals with the ramifications of living
with a transplanted heart; he feels the heart itself to be the “intruder”
of the title, having been forced on him by failing health that worsened
when the transplant made him susceptible to cancer. Denis reverses
this process: her film’s central narrative is about a mature
man (Michel Subor) who pays dodgy types to find a young man’s
heart to replace his current, weakening organ. But one does not
choose to incorporate part of another into one’s own self
and come off a hero. And the heart is only one of his illicit consumptions
that will end with his comeuppance.
Subor’s character lives in a secluded woodland
house near the French-Swiss border; despite living near a grown
son whom he barely acknowledges, he is preoccupied with the idea
of another, long-lost son he sired while visiting Tahiti. Ignoring
his “known” son, he decides to return a conquering hero
to his “unknown” son by condescendingly bestowing upon
him a pile of cash. No apparent reason is given for his substitution
of an imagined mixed-race son with one of flesh-and-blood and racial
accordance, but S’en fout la mort’s Ardennes offers
a precedent: Both characters seek to establish power through ethnic
assimilation, and both characters are ruthless in consolidating
that power. Trespassers into our hero’s residence can expect
to find themselves stabbed to death and deposited in the nearby
underbrush, making his motions towards his far-off descendant seem
less than fatherly love and more like colonial arrogance.
And, for the first time, Denis metes out something
resembling retribution. Subor arrives in Tahiti to find neither
a welcoming Polynesian son nor a way back to his white one. The
whereabouts of his mythical progeny are unknown, and the local populace
scams him out of his money by arranging for a surrogate. But his
failing health requires that he come up with another heart, and
having double-crossed his old dealers it is arranged that his French
son is forced to make the sacrifice. As he lopes back to his borderland
to bury his offspring, the directive is clear: Those who cross cultures
also cross moral lines, and those who are not satisfied with the
stability of race and culture threaten the stability of themselves
and those around them.
But what price stability? One wants to commend
Denis for standing up for the wretched of the earth who walk unmoored
in a world without values; one also wonders if her apparent cure—the
resurrection of older values—isn’t worse than the disease.
But there is always the opposition of chaos and stability—categories
which may take each other’s guise and which may require each
other to give them meaning, but which always haunt a world that
no longer has certainty to burn. The challenge is to find the solution
that would dissolve her dichotomy and bring her world—and
ours—some lasting peace.
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L’intrus
Articles in this
Section
Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture
in 2004
by shelly kraicer
Identity Politics: Issues in the Films of Claire
Denis
by travis mackenzie hoover
and in the magazine...
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Lumière
by tony rayns
The Alonso Murder Case: Los muertos
by quintín
"The film’s final shot is Dah looking
out of a taxicab that passes out of the frame; it’s a poignant
but resigned image, suggesting that defeat is perhaps the only
morally defensible position in a world of fluid masters."
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