Claire Denis

forever since i saw l'intrus but it's a pretty ridiculous comparison to me, here. i was so shocked by the distance between what i was expecting of this, based on cannes reviews & other feedback - basically unusually trained, un-peripatetic torture porn - & what this film actually is (obviously the takehome here is just never read anything reported from cannes i know i know); the film is maybe only mildly more intense than, & in its reach & perspective is very similar to, j'ai pas sommeil. i wonder whether the part of the response that considers this just compelling trash is really just all of the thread involving the gun, & its denouement, which: yeah are their own little kinda noir episode. but there was still a lot to like about this. it gave me enough pause & space & stimulus to circle around everything you see in a way more interesting way than we've ever otherwise accustomed to. like the lindon performance is really interesting, i think. everybody laughed when he snapped off some of the baguette. the sex made me feel emasculated, & that it was so convincing of him & so distressing at more of a distance (for me). & she's just so confident with every other small role - the little boy, the bruno forestier guy ("jerk me off"), &c.

found it really interesting to see her working with digital; i thought maybe a third of it was jarring - like the shots of alex descas - & at other points she was in this beautiful new mode, the scene on the boat, lindon talking in the back of the car, & man a couple of really exquisite, i-guess-chris-doyle-ish shots like the opening rain.

But, yeah, the end is baffling. It's crazy atmospheric, yes, but why show us the footage? It's so unlike her.

i really disagree with this! i think she's obviously very committed to a kind of panorama, which trusts somebody to leave out the specifics, but i don't think that's noticably elliptical or shy. there are shots in 35 rhums & i'm just gonna assume from memory trouble every day that aren't dissimilar, & for it to bookend the film confrontationally feels like a necessary element of what the film was about, particularly given the reference points of like the unindictable DSK, &c.

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http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/claire-denis-zadie-smith-wild-bunch-on-space-mission/5089891.article?blocktitle=LATEST-FILM-NEWS&contentID=40562

Pattinson is "attached"

http://www.screendaily.com/news/robert-pattinson-to-star-in-claire-denis-sci-fi/5092092.article

olafur eliasson being involved is orders of magnitude more exciting imo

Anyone seen Let the Sunshine In? Gonna do so tomorrow. Pinkerton loves it:

The true testimony to the preeminence of Let the Sunshine In is not in its selection of themes, but in its remarkable attention to the fine grain of human behavior. Put plainly, I know of few filmmakers who bring to bear an emotional and cinematographic intelligence and attention from scene to scene that is comparable to that of Denis. (I have interviewed the filmmaker only once, and her keen insistence of cross-examining my clumsily worded questions until they achieved absolute precision of language still keeps me up nights.) The drawn-out pas de deux between Isabelle and her actor friend is a perfect illustration of Denis’s craft, a low-key set piece that invests with aching feeling the proximity of two hands and the possibilities that this proximity suggests, the inherent erotic tension of an idling car, and the comical pretext of a nightcap champagne bottle left unopened on a living room coffee table.

Yeah, it's pretty fucking good. Perhaps not Denis' best, but good. Her run from 1999-2009 is a pretty stunning ten years of filmmaking.

Loved it!!!

lots of hate on my Letterboxd feed; i think it's easily her best since 35 Rhums

https://i.imgur.com/s2sGAlD.png

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Had a second go at The Intruder, 13 years after the first. Still somewhat baffled, but variations on a theme of searching for a heart and a son, I guess? At least one great joke: "Do you want a glass of water?" followed by a cut to the rolling ocean.

DP Agnes Godard was there for a Q&A (35mm, Lincoln Center) and said "I miss the negative... digital is mathematic, film is intuitive." And a quintessential LincCtr old woman in the back third of the theater couldn't help herself even before the audience was called on, shouting "WHAT IS THE FILM ABOUT!?!"

Lol

i really fucking hate old people for someone who almost is one

She's not wrong.

you and the Upper West Side Golden Girls are united on this one

Lol, I asked Claire Denis a question at one of those Q&As once, but that was when I was much further from approaching my dotage.

that feeling when you learn A24 bought Claire Denis’ HIGH LIFE and is planning a big theatrical release. pic.twitter.com/VgMN9kb7uQ

— david ehrlich (@davidehrlich) September 12, 2018

:)

I found it kinda... dumb?

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5964-claire-denis-s-high-life

Blind spot for me so I started chronologically watching her filmography at the weekend.

Chocolat is stunning - a great companion piece to Wargnier's (lesser but still v good) Indochine which I watched the other week. I love the exploration of the post-colonial feeling of, I don't know the best word, "rootlessness" maybe? All this has reminded me to have a rewatch of Zama now it's out on DVD.

Nearly more impressed with the fact that no animals were hurt during S'en fout la mort than the actual film. Didn't quite expect the subtleness and I can tell I will be chewing on the ideas here for a while.

Beau Travail wonderfully beguiling

J'ai pas sommeil rolled along very nicely but I was definitely enjoying the wandering direction and little glances of the whole thing more before the murder plot came to the fore.

U.S. Go Home was unexpectedly very fun but delicate where required - a few lovely sequences. The brother's spazz out dance sequence is superb, as is the Dad dancing at the lame party. Got a bit of an American Graffiti vibe. Unexpected Vincent Gallo!

you so inhabit the mood of a girl attending a party that has excited while on the horizon but which disappoints and leaves one directionless while attending. there is a scene of two girls being kind of loud on a bus, & you are even 'with' them then, understanding them, remembering. it unfolds so gracefully.

i probably would have got around to catching this sooner had someone told me how much of it was dancing. really a canonical teenage film, i think (would have to build up the rest of this canon, but: seventeen, paranoid park, ..?)

― honest weights, square dealings (schlump),

schlump nailed it. Highly recommend.

just watched Friday Night........ well holy shit.

One of my absolute faves by her. Hard to believe the same filmmaker made that silly, recent and overrated one with Binoche.

I like both fine.

I remember her doing a Q&A at the NYFF for Friday Night, which is based on a novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim. Someone asked, "Why did these two people fall in love?"

CD replied, "Because the book said so."

xp Friday Night felt completely of a piece with Let the Sunshine In... certainly superior, in every way, a masterpiece, it's more surprising that the same filmmaker made White Material, Trouble Every Day, and 35 Rhums.

why do you say that flappy (I haven't seen Vendredi Soir)

longish article and interview here:

http://cinema-scope.com/features/soft-and-hard-claire-denis-on-high-life/

I bailed on it once I realised it was v. spoilery.

Xp Funny I really l see the similarities between Vendredi Soir, and 35 Rhums. Trouble Every Day is her massive outlier for me, both in style and quality, and it’s a fine movie.

Still need to see Bastards, Let the Sunshine In, and High Life.

just that Friday Night is so impressionistic and painterly. the similarity to LTSI is just in the way she shoots naked bodies up close. there's more plot in LTSI, in Friday Night there's hardly any.

Yeah, to me Friday Night and 35 Rhums exist almost as companion pieces to each other.

I saw it for the first time recently but I need to watch 35 Rhums again, I wasn't really in the best mood & was pretty distracted. Didn't realize it was an update of Late Spring until later but the similarities are obvious, especially that final shot (which is great).

I never made the connection between 35 Rhums and Late Spring before

I need to watch it again too, I've only recently come to understand the pleasure of watching her films, when I first started they seemed so oblique and subtle it was hard for me to latch on to them.

she does the whole close body thing so well

"usually we close late on Fridays; but with the strike..."

I really don't understand what the deal was with the anchovy squiggling on the pizza in Friday Night. there were a bunch of other surreal moments in that film too

I love Claire Denis

other surreal moments…the brief imagined scene of her with Vincent Lindon at her friend’s apartment with the crying baby, the elision of a scene showing an encounter with him on the stairs at the arcade with one of her brushing her hair in the restroom, so close up it’s hard to guess what’s happening, right at the moment she decides to take a chance

The Intruder is the first Denis film I’m not crazy about. It had striking moments visually, and the idea of the stalker was interesting, but between the dreams, portrayal of past events, and the current day narrative it was frustrating to try to make sense of it

Maybe a couple more viewings and I will appreciate it

i hope you will. it's one of her best.

That is a film I fell in love with instantly. I have yet to see all other Denis movies apart from the latest with Juliette Binoche, but the memory of The Intruder still lingers on, years after the viewing.
The confusionary state(s) it put across was the thing I most loved about it.

NYC retro

https://www.bam.org/film/2019/strange-desire-the-films-of-claire-denis

she'll be here too

metrograph.com/series/series/213/an-evening-with-claire-denis

Coming up to the city for the last day of High Life and missing the Kaurismäki Metrograph retro by one day 😔

saw Bastards. I like that Claire Denis uses The Tindersticks in the soundtracks of two of her films

She's used the Tindersticks or Stuart Staples in every film she's made since Nenette et Boni in 1996!

never saw Nenette et Boni, only started noticing it with the title song to Trouble Every Day. didn't realize that they did the scores for 35 Rhums and White Material

amazing scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIIzc_DluY4

I like that! US Go Home is another one of her films I still have to watch

glad to see Gregoire Colin show up in so many of her films

she loves amateur dance scenes so much. i do too!

They always express character.

Alex Descas is amazing in No Fear No Die… viscerally painful. And 180 degrees from his character 18 years later in 35 Rhums.