The Cinema of Claire Denis: Post-Colonial Configurations

220 The Cinema of Claire Denis: Post-Colonial Configurations1 Ruth A. Hottell The University of Toledo Although Claire Denis refers to herself as a commercial filmmaker, she has proven to be far from run-of-the-mill mainstream, even for France where more individualism is allowed than in the United States. Drawing possibly in part on her early professional experience as first assistant director for the independent, quirky Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders as well as Jacques Rivette, Denis has proven that she can make films that sell tickets while meeting with critical success. Concurrently, her films afford voice to those usually marginalized in society and its mirror media product, the cinema. Specifically, Denis's major fiction films have each centered around characters who are excluded from society and/or from access to power. For example, in her first feature film, Chocolat (1988), Denis represents the French colonial world as seen through the eyes of a young child who, due to her status outside the adult colonial sphere, can move between the worlds of the colonized and colonizer. In S'en fout la mort (1990), Denis's camera takes us to the heart of a violent sport, cock fighting, and the plight of the illegal immigrants who come to Paris to train their prize fighter. In J'ai pas sommeil (1994) Denis walks us along concentric circles that weave through nocturnal Paris, treating alienation and marginalization through her nonjudgmental lens.2 In Nénette et Boni (1994), she turns to the Beur community of Marseilles and brings us inside the fishbowl rather than commenting from outside the parameters. With Beau travail (1999), she ventures into the closed masculine world of the French foreign legion to explore discreetly the hidden perversion within. Trouble Every Day (2001), with its unsettling topic of vampiric-like cannibalism, explores links between mysterious illnesses contracted in Africa and the unleashing of sexual energy.3 More recently, with Vendredi soir (2002), she explores a nocturnal, eerie microcosm provoked by traffic jams during the 1995 general strikes. In this article, I will analyze two representative films, Chocolat and J'ai pas sommeil, because they articulate clearly Denis's characteristic gaze. THE CINEMA OF CLAIRE DENIS: POST-COLONIAL CONFIGURATIONS 221 Seen together, these films represent two different configurations of postcolonial societal phenomena that posit two different outcomes and permutations of the colonized other. In the case of Chocolat, the boy, the domestic servant, hovers in a no-man's land between his culture and the world of his French employers; in J'ai pas sommeil, the racial, sexual other pushes the obscenity implicit in his person and sexuality from the obscurity of Pigalle's clubs into the streets and commits explicit forms of depravity and transgressions against the system. Chocolat Denis is a filmmaker who exposes alienation, embracing otherness in an intimate portrait of the psychic pain experienced by the alienated other. In her first film, Chocolat, she tells a story of colonial subjugation and repressed rebellion of the colonized spirit. It is significant also that she tells the story through the eyes of a young girl—a young white girl ostensibly a member of the dominant power class due to her race and position as daughter of a colonial administrator, but actually outside the system herself due to her age and her mixed identifications. France does not know firsthand the country whose name she carries; rather, she identifies with the country, Cameroon, whose true indigenous people regard her as an outsider, a symbol of the conquerors who bound their spirit, exported their brothers and sisters as slaves to the Americas, and trained them as domestic help to serve the colonizer's needs. Now they are the domestic help who observe closely, although always from the outside, the displaced European luxury surrounding the colonial mansion. We see consistently throughout the film that France feels a part of the country and identifies with the Cameroonians, not the French or the British. Near the beginning of the film, as she watches her mother tend to graves from World War II, she shows her total lack of recognition for Europeans as well as her self-identification with Africa. (See scene #1, called...