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Claire Denis in 3 subversive films, from Trouble Every Day to A Beautiful Sunshine Within
French filmmaker Claire Denis has been awarded for her body of work Bold with the 2021 Vigo Honorary Award, one of the oldest cinematographic distinctions, on Monday 11 October. The opportunity to look back at three major films by the director and screenwriter who cut her teeth alongside Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders.
1. “Nénette et Boni” (1997): a lively Marseille melodrama
The filmmaker Claire Denis described this film, in an interview with Cahiers du cinémalike “a kind of Marseille melodrama, with characters who are stereotypes, more in the tradition of the santons of Provence.” Inspired by Marcel Pagnol as much as by The Enfants terribles by Jean Cocteau and the Phocaean city, the filmmaker tells a tragic family story centred around two lost people. Boni is a shy pizza maker marked by the death of his mother who takes in his younger sister, Nénette, who flees her boarding school while she is pregnant. This hard, remarkably filmed film is illuminated by the inhabited soundtrack of the Tindersticks and the sunny appearance of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as a baker dressed in candy pink.
2. “Trouble Every Day” (2001): A Gory Metaphor for Human Relationships
A disturbing film,
Trouble Every Day
pushed many spectators towards the exit before the end of its theatrical screenings, 20 years ago. The shadowy Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle play the two magnetic heroes prey to cannibalism. Beyond the bloody and provocative aspect, Trouble Every Day takes on a metaphysical dimension in the way it metaphorically links romantic relationships and cannibalism. Once again, the Tindersticks do a fascinating job in terms of sound, the soundtrack proving to be as haunting as the shots of wanderings in Paris worthy of gothic paintings.
3. “A Beautiful Sunshine Within” (2017): A thwarted quest for love
With this strong, moving and funny film, Claire Denis has undoubtedly made one of the most beautiful films of the last five years about love and above all, disappointed love. It is about Isabelle (magnificent Juliette Binoche who is one of the director’s favourite actresses), a divorced painter in her fifties and mother of a little girl, who is desperately looking for love with a capital A. The depth of this voluble comedy that stars Xavier Beauvois, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Gérard Depardieu and Philippe Katerine undoubtedly comes from the work from which he is inspired: the Fragments of a lover’s discourse from Roland Barthes, which we never tire of rediscovering.
