The A posteriori le cinema series is an opportunity to celebrate the 7e art by revisiting key titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
On a Cameroonian road, a young French traveler, whose name is France, is hitchhiked. And the passing landscape… And France reminiscing… It was in 1957, when she was just a child, her father had just been appointed colony commander in Mindif, and her mother was pining from Europe. At their service, there was this man, Protée, intelligent, fascinating, with whom little France forged a privileged bond. Unveiled in official competition at Cannes 35 years ago, in May 1988, Chocolatethe very first film by Claire Denis, immediately signaled to the world that she is now one of the most respected filmmakers in the profession.
Like France’s father, Claire Denis’ father was a colonial civil servant. While insisting that Chocolate is not autobiographical, the director admitted, in snatches, that the film is inspired by what she saw and knew in her youth.
To review Movements, she said in March 2023: “I grew up in Africa. I traveled with my parents to countries emerging from colonization. I experienced the independence of Cameroon in particular…”
In introduction to this interview, journalists Iris Deniau and Jean-Roch de Logivière recall the context of the film’s release:
“Spring 1988: Chocolate electrifies and divides the spectators of the Cannes Film Festival. Claire Denis released her first film, that of a white woman educated in the twilight of colonial Africa, trained with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, reader of Frantz Fanon: a subtle, intelligent, interpretable cinema. It is then explained to him that his gaze is sexualizing, in addition to being symptomatic of his gender. The director refutes these two accusations: she does not want to make women’s films any more than men’s films. »
As for the “sexualizing gaze”, this reproach, without pun intended, testifies to an obvious blindness. Indeed, in Chocolate, Claire Denis shows for what it is the sexual fetishism to which black men were, and are, the subject. In the film, Aimée, France’s mother, tries to seduce Protée, but the latter rejects the advances of his boss.
In their work Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian PerspectiveJean-Pierre Boulé and Ursula Tidd note in this regard:
“Denis has indicated in interviews that, despite the producers’ insistence that the film should be some sort of romance between Aimée and Protée, Protée’s refusal was the film’s raison d’être. »
The unhealthy power relationship prevailing in this declining colonial empire and the racism inherent in colonialism is what interests the filmmaker. Thus, after being rejected, Aimée will ask her husband to “take Protée out of the house, also the ” boy of the French couple will he be relegated to outside functions.
However, Claire Denis does not make a monster of the mother, nor of the father for that matter. Manichaeism is no more his cup of tea than exotic idylls. Even the filmmaker treats Aimée with empathy. Impossible, here, not to think of this confidence of the director during a lesson of cinema at the Cinémathèque française, in 2017:
“The desire for cinema, I always had it, even when I lived in a country where there was no way to see films. Because I had a mother who missed it. And who told me. Listening to my mother talk about how she felt… She loved cinema, it was vital for her […] I went to the movies to experience this amazing thing she was talking about that was kind of like experiencing love for the first time. »
Film the bodies
With hindsight, we see how much, in Chocolate, Claire Denis was already laying the foundations of her cinema. It must be said that since her training at the Institute for Advanced Film Studies (IDHEC), she had been the assistant not only of the aforementioned Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, but also of Costa-Gavras and Jacques Rivette.
Hence the confidence and mastery emanating from this first feature film. An aspect that later became characteristic, which is immediately striking, is the filmmaker’s way of filming bodies.
“If we were to focus on what distinguishes Claire Denis’ films from others, we would above all have to evoke their ‘corporality’, the penetrating way they have of making the physical presence act”, writes Fabian Maray in Faces of European cinema.
In an essay published by Criterioncritic Girish Shambu goes further:
“The power of Denis’ cinema stems from the fact that he completely engages the mind and the body at the same time: the entire spectator. »
This acute awareness of bodies can certainly translate into a carnal dimension that will exacerbate erotic tension, as in the recent Stars at Noon (stars at noon), but it can also be simply, as in Chocolatea way of playing on the physical contrast between little France (Cécile Ducasse) and great Protée (Isaac de Bankolé), accomplices but separated by an intangible border (see the very beautiful but very sad scene where the father evokes the line of horizon as a metaphor).
“Alongside the Lilliputian child, the giant Protée… A physical and almost silent duo…” writes Gérard Lefort in Release for the tenth anniversary of the film.
A maverick
Here, Lefort points to another specificity of Claire Denis’ cinema, namely her parsimonious use of dialogue. With her, it is the image — and the bodies within the image — that speak.
“What scares me in the dialogues is that we sometimes have the impression that they are only there to explain what we might not understand in the film”, confides in 2018 to the Duty the one who, with Chantal Akerman for Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brusselswas in 2012 the only director, she for Good workto appear in the list of the 100 best films of the ten-year ranking of the British Film Institute.
Other female directors joined them there in 2022, and Good work (which also revisits French colonialism in Africa) passed from the 76e at the 7e place. To say that she is one of the greatest filmmakers there is is not hyperbole.
Original and rigorous, Claire Denis has, for 35 years, dabbled in all genres without ever bending to their conventions, from “suburban film” (Nenette and Boni, 35 rums) to science fiction (HighLife), via the political thriller (Stars at Noon), the horror (Trouble Every Day), the serial killer movie (I’m not sleepy) or sentimental drama (Friday night, A beautiful inner sun). This, while maintaining an admirable constancy in this formal approach which is his.
“At 76, neither conformism nor the glitter of big ceremonies compel her to look at the world as it should. She cuts the road with her characters, faithful to their mistakes, chronicling their bifurcations. Desiring wanderings”, we sum up in Movements.
And it is with Chocolate and the reminiscences of this child become a woman who will have begun these “desiring wanderings”. To conclude Gérard Lefort:
“It’s so good this piece of Chocolate looks like one of Thousand and one Night : she as a dreamy Aladine and he as a good genius who arises under the caress. We will never know how much they loved each other. »
Perhaps, after all, there is a form of love story in this first film.