claire denis

Paris, Texas (1984)

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There are some major film-world names attached to the 1984 road trip drama Paris, Texas. If nothing else, it is the Harry Dean Stanton movie, the most memorable example of the notoriously unfussy character actor stepping into the leading-man spotlight. Even so, German model-turned-actress Nastassja Kinski threatens to steal the whole movie from under him in a just a couple scenes buried late in the third act; Kinski radiates enough It Girl beauty & cool that the film’s most iconic stills are of her modeling a pink sweater dress, not of Stanton wandering the American sands. German director Wim Wenders obviously looms large over the production as well, gawking at the dust & concrete vastness of the American landscape with the amazement of an astronaut exploring an alien planet. Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller puts in career-defining work here too, dwelling in the ombre gradients between the natural light of dusk and the neon glow of roadside motels. This is the kind of movie that’s so stacked with big, important names that even its credited Assistant Director, French auteur Claire Denis, is an art cinema icon in her own right. And yet, the name that was most on my mind while watching the film for the first time this week was American painter Edward Hopper, whose work’s melancholic sparseness is echoed in each of Wenders & Müller’s carefully distanced compositions, to great effect.

Of course, it turns out my association of this 40-year-old movie with one of this nation’s most accomplished fine artists was not an original thought. After the screening concluded, I immediately found an article titled “How Edward Hopper Inspired Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and More” that detailed Hopper’s artistic influence on Wenders in clear, direct language. Most importantly, it includes direct quotes from Wenders himself, who explained in his 2015 book, The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: and Reflections on Other Artists, “‘All the paintings of Edward Hopper could be taken from one long movie about America, each one the beginning of a new scene […] Each picture digs deep into the American Dream and investigates that very American dilemma of appearance versus reality […] [He] continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms, or couples who live separate lives together without speaking […] In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.’” I could have written the exact same thing about Paris, Texas that Wenders says about Hopper in those quotes. I just would have worded it in clumsier, less articulate phrasing.

Paris, Texas is a solemn 1980s road trip through Edward Hopper’s America, conveniently relocated to the great state of Texas via interstate highway. Harry Dean Stanton stars as a weary, severely dehydrated traveler. He seems to be operating under a magic spell that compels him to walk through the Mojave Desert until he forgets everything about himself and where he came from. When his estranged brother (sci-fi convention regular Dean Stockwell) rescues him from that aimless mission to wander his identity into oblivion, it takes days for him to rebuild his persona from the ground up. He has to relearn how to talk, how to dress, how to act around relatives, and so on — recovering one personality trait at a time until he can recall who he was before he fucked off into the desert for a four-year eternity. As soon as he remembers, he immediately wishes he could forget again. It turns out he chose to obliterate his former self, because that man was an abusive, alcoholic prick. It’s an epiphany that inspires one last road trip, as he attempts to make right by reuniting his young, abandoned son with the young, abandoned wife he used to physically abuse (Kinksi). The effort is bittersweet. It disrupts all of the healing that’s accumulated in the years of his absence just so he can seek some personal absolution, but his heart is at least in the right place, seemingly for the first time in his life.

Like many great movies, Paris, Texas is very slow, very sad, and very beautiful, with many humorous little grace notes throughout. As cute as it is to watch Stanton mimic Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp while bonding with his sweetheart son, the full weight of his past sins sits heavy on that memory by the final scene, when he abandons the boy a second time. Those sins also create an impenetrable barrier between him and Kinki’s mother figure. The former lovers can only communicate via phone on opposite sides of the peep show booth where she now works, barely able to stomach the sight of each other. Müller’s Hopper-inspired landscape photography underlines that isolation in every exterior. While these European filmmakers seem wryly amused with the fast food, billboard ads, and novelty roadside attractions that define American kitsch, they also emphasize the sparseness of the country’s sprawling landscape to portray the characters within as isolated, lonely, broken people. The Edward Hopper of it all is a studied observation of physical distance, where people are only connected to each other through long-reaching shadows, interstate concrete, and telephone wire. Even the wandering Stanton’s Norman Rockwell daydream of his reunited family is framed within a vast, vacant lot in the titular Texan town, where nothing awaits him but dust.

Paris, Texas screened at The Broad in New Orleans this week, presented as a new 4k restoration by Janus Films. It was the final screening in this year’s Gap Tooth Cinema program, which is now on break until the first week of January. The screening sold out early, then was moved to the cinema’s largest theater, then sold out again. Like most of my experiences with Gap Tooth’s programming, it was wonderful to see such a gorgeous picture for the first time so big & loud with such an engaged, respectful crowd. I recently put together a Letterboxd list of my favorite new-to-me film discoveries from this year, and Paris, Texas was just one of many titles I got to see theatrically thanks to Gap Tooth: namely, Black Narcissus, Nashville, High Heels, Juliet of the Spirits, The Lovers on the Bridge, and the ephemeral America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. They’re doing great work, and if you live in New Orleans you should be making time for their screenings in your weekly schedule. Just, you know, please wait until I can purchase my ticket first.

-Brandon Ledet

Beau Travail (1999)

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It’s no secret that I was no fan of Claire Denis’s High Life when I saw it nearly six years ago, but I had always heard the director’s name in conjunction with high praise for her work. Often foremost among those cited as her masterpieces is Beau Travail, a 1999 film loosely based on the (infamously unfinished) Herman Melville novel Billy Budd. And the people are right! Beau Travail is a ballet, a very simple story that plays out slowly over long tracking shots of desert topography and portraiture of stoic, unchanging faces, with very little dialogue. Instead, the narrative is composed almost entirely of internal monologue of Adjutant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant), as he recalls the last days he spent in Djibouti overseeing a division of the French Foreign Legion there, and the mistake that cost him his career. 

I’m going to relate to you the whole plot in this paragraph, because that’s not what’s important here, and there’s not much to it, really. In the desert, Galoup oversees a group of about fifteen Legionnaires. He has a heroic worship of his own superior, Commandant Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), which may verge on the romantic. Galoup’s life takes a turn with the arrival of Gilles Sentain, a new young Legionnaire. Galoup takes an instant dislike to the newest member of the team, which is exacerbated when he perceives that Forestier has a fondness for Sentain. While in the field at an abandoned barracks, Galoup goads Sentain into striking him by excessively punishing another Legionnaire and kicking a canteen out of Sentain’s hands when the boy attempts to give water to the man being punished. Sentain’s own disciplinary action takes the form of being stranded in the desert and forced to walk back to camp, but Sentain’s compass has been tampered with, and he becomes lost and apparently dies. Although most assume that Sentain simply deserted, a common practice among Legionnaires, Forestier nonetheless sends Galoup back to France to face court martial and dismissal for his actions; back in Marseille, Galoup recollects the events that we have just witnessed while demonstrating that he cannot shake the habits of a soldier, and the film ends ambiguously as Galoup dances alone in an empty nightclub. 

Beau Travail is a film about ambiguity. We know next to nothing about Galoup’s past, so everything that we learn about him is delivered through his narration, which is clearly not always reliable. Discussing his relationship with Forestier first, it’s clear that Galoup is, or at least was, in love with him at some point in time, but my interpretation is that there probably was some kind of sexual relationship in the past in which Galoup was more emotionally invested. He narrates that the commandant never confided in him, but he does so while lovingly coaxing a memento: a bracelet inscribed Bruno. This aligns with my interpretation of the scene between Forestier and Sentain while the latter is on night watch (one of very few scenes in which Galoup is not present to witness what is otherwise a fairly straightforward first-person perspective on his part). Forestier seems flirty with the twenty-two-year-old and beautiful Sentain, from which I infer that Forestier occasionally latches onto young and handsome recruits, with Galoup having been one of his previous conquests/victims, with Galoup still harboring feelings for the commandant. 

None of this is explicit, however, and there’s a great deal left up to interpretation. Their relationship could very easily be the purely professional one that we actually witness onscreen, and it’s entirely possible that the scene in which Forestier coyly interacts with Sentain happened entirely in Galoup’s imagination. The departure from the “Galoup’s perspective” format could be implying this; even though he isn’t present in the scene, this is still his story, it’s just one that’s created by him rather than one that is being recalled. That’s another level of the film’s ambiguity, as much of it plays out as if what we’re seeing is the truth while what we’re hearing are Galoup’s internal rationalizations and judgments. In nothing that we see does Sentain do anything to earn Galoup’s scorn, we are merely told that Sentain was inordinately popular with the other Legionnaires, and we are told that Sentain goads Galoup. Yet there are other large sections of the film in which what we’re seeing feels more representational, most notably the various choreographed exercises that the Legionnaires do, glistening beneath the hot African sun. They are more dance than training, and there’s one sequence in which the group is doing a series of stretches which ends with all of them in a position that makes them appear dead, the camera winding about slowly to ensure we see the entire squad in a synchronized death pose. Are these scenes “real”? Why does Galoup go out one night in his uniform but is in his all-black civvies the next morning when he encounters the other Legionnaires? The reality being conveyed here isn’t important, the truth is, at least as far as what’s true for Galoup. 

As we catch up narratively to Galoup back home in Marseille, we see that the man may leave the military but the military does not leave the man. He irons his civilian clothing to a perfectly crisp press and in the penultimate scene makes his bed with the precision of man who’s faced inspection. Once this is complete, he sets his pistol next to the bed and lies down on it, the camera passing over his chest tattoo which reads “”Sert la bonne cause et meurt” (“Serve the good cause and die”) before finally closing in on a pulsing vein in his bicep that feels ominous, as if we are waiting for that movement to stop. Instead, the film cuts to Galoup in a nightclub. We know that he’s alone as he stands before a wall of diamond shaped mirrors, beveled at the edges, which we’ve seen a few times throughout the film, as through starts and fits, he dances alone to “Rhythm of the Night.” I thought that the mirrored wall was in the club in Djibouti, which would imply that this is a dream sequence, but is it? Or does Galoup just fill in the details with the familiar when his memory fails him? Did he kill himself, or is he finally just loosening up? I couldn’t tell you; I can only convey my interpretation, and it would be better for you to find this one and let it wash over you so that you can make your own judgments. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

High Life (2019)

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Oddly enough, two nights after I went and saw Knife+Heart, I took in a screening of High Life, the new English-language sci-fi horror film from French director Claire Denis, the visionary behind Un beau soleil intérieur and Beau travail. When asked by a friend how I liked them, I said “I loved Knife+Heart! It’s so French!” followed immediately by “I hated High Life! It’s so French!”

CW/TW: Discussion of on screen sexual assault. That’s way more of a warning than this movie gives you. Also, you know, there’s a scene in this movie where a female character rapes a sedated man to acquire his ejaculate, then squats and drips it out into her open palm so she can impregnate someone else. You know, for science.

In its defense, High Life is not a bad movie. It’s beautifully framed and edited, and the extended lingering shots of both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic–from the depths of space and all the beautiful delights and terrors that it contains to close-ups of eyes and protracted shots of delicate droplets of water on leaves—make for a beautiful experience on the big screen. But there’s also sexual assault aplenty, shot with the same cold indifference, not to mention flat performances from almost every member of the cast, all of whom you’ve seen give stronger, bolder performances in other things.

High Life tells (in non-chronological order) the story of Monte (Robert Pattinson), a mostly unwilling astronaut on a damned voyage. A convict serving a life sentence, he and other young prisoners in the same situation are placed aboard a utilitarian space ship for the purpose of determining if black holes can be used to provide a source of renewable energy. The captain, Chandra (Lars Eidinger) is the only person who is not a felon, and the life support on the ship demands he make a log entry every 24 hours, or the crew will die. The real authority, however, is Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a medical officer who killed her own children and now oversees the regulation of sedatives among the crew and is engaged in her own side experiment to try and create a perfect offspring, although her efforts have largely been in vain and none of the children survive, even if they make it to term. Members of the crew use “The Box,” a masturbatorium, to relieve their pent-up sexual frustrations, and Dibs collects DNA from all aboard as part of her “scientific” enquiry, most notably Ettore (Ewan Mitchell). Other crew members/prisoners of note include Tcherny (André Benjamin/3000) and Boyse (Mia Goth, of Suspiria); Tcherny is Monte’s only real friend, who reminisces about life on earth and the family he left behind, while Boyse is a deeply troubled and unpleasant woman who is the first and only mother on the ship to successfully bear a child, as the result of two separate sexual assaults.

I’m really not quite sure what to make of this movie. Were it directed by a man, we could call this film troublingly sexist and degrading and call it a day, but with Claire Denis at the helm, it’s not so easy. A lot of this is bound up in the treatment of Boyse, and the questions that revolve around her. She is utterly unlikable in every imaginable way, which speaks to Goth’s range, considering how much I enjoyed her turn in Suspiria. There’s something to admire in her declaration that “[her] body obeys [her]” after Ettore sexually assaults her, but we never learn what her crime was that landed her in prison and thus on this shit detail in the first place, and her willingness to kill Nansen (Agata Buzek), who attempted to come to her defense, further obscures any possibility that we could really understand Boyse. She’s more than just an animal running on instinct, but she’s wild in a way that makes it impossible to understand her actions or desires.

In addition to being non-linear, the film is deliberately obtuse and obscure when revealing details. No one on the ship ever recounts why they ended up there; we only learn of this from a brief scene aboard a train in which a young reporter interviews a man credited only as “Indian Professor” (Victor Banerjee). Very little takes place planetside: this Professor rides inside of a train, two children play with a dog that later dies, and Ettore and Boyse are also seen riding on the tops of a train (presumably not the same one but who knows) while Monte discusses what it was like to be a societal castoff and outcast. The traintop scenes are shot in the first person, but the audience is never given clarification of whether these are Monte’s memories or not, or if they are projections of his assumptions; after all, we later learn that the crime for which he is incarcerated occurred when he was a child, so it makes very little sense for him to be free and enjoying the lifestyle of a crusty wanderer as a young adult. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it shouldn’t matter. But to me, it does.

At a very cursory glance, the film seems to be attempting to create a narrative about the dehumanizing treatment of the incarcerated, perhaps weaving that together with a statement about overpopulation or resource allotment, or even eugenics. As a statement about any of these topics, the film is fairly shallow. Is the film about the fact that all human progress in some way relies upon exploitation of the labor of a lower class? Is it about historical precedent of experimentation on prisoners? Is it about countering the idealized speculative fiction narratives of Star Trek and its cohort that point toward a lofty future of post-scarcity humanitarian egalitarian utopiae by showing that space travel and technological advancement will really only show us our true, animalistic selves? Yes! To all those things! Maybe(?)! It’s also about 110 minutes long, but that still doesn’t really tell you anything, does it?

That’s what I mean by the film being “too French.” High Life is has awful lot of Big Ideas, but not much in the way of Big Statements. It would be intellectually dishonest to say “This film does not demonize the prison system,” because it clearly wants to and expects the audience to fill in those gaps; at the same time, it would be a more straightforward lie to say “This film demonizes the prison system,” because it never really does. We see that there are outright dangerous people in the system, like Dibs, as well as seemingly good people like Monte (it helps that his crime was one of passion that was in defense of a helpless animal, which is almost laughable in its lack of subtlety), and others who were perhaps decent but were pushed beyond their limits as the result of the dehumanization of incarceration, like Boyse and perhaps Ettore (I’m not saying that Ettore’s aggressive assault of Boyse isn’t morally reprehensible or that it’s an unavoidable consequence of being involuntarily celibate, just that the film might be making that argument). Is Denis’s thesis that even good and moral people will become monsters in a captive prison state? If so, it follows that murder and rape are inevitabilities in such a broken system, absolving the individual from both agency and responsibility, which is grotesque. The only person that we see rise above these moral lapses is Monte, whose only stated difference from his shipmates is the fact that he is voluntarily celibate, going so far as to even abstain from the dubious pleasures of “The Box.”

I’ve never seen any of Denis’s other work. The friend with whom I saw this movie is very pro-Denis; when I asked if he wanted to check this one out, he cited her as his favorite living director. He was rather pleased with this cinematic experience, noting that she had directed his favorite movie about cannibalism, which led to me asking about Raw (we also saw that one together), and he made the statement that Raw wouldn’t exist without Denis. That’s all well and good, but as my first foray into her oeuvre, I’m not sure that I’m impressed. The musical score is haunting, every actor gives a great performance, and many of the visuals are pure visual art, but on the whole, this is a film that I’m not sold on, and I’m not sure I’m sold on Denis. Looking back over her filmography, she’s made multiple films with Vincent Gallo, and even wanted him to star in this one, which makes me question a lot about her instincts (if you’ve ever accidentally swallowed something that had a label on it that says “Induce vomiting if consumed,” here’s a self-aggrandizing, Trump-worshipping essay by Gallo to get you started; my favorite commentary on it came from The Playlist, which wrote “[we] reached out to Roger Ebert for comment, [then] remembered that Roger Ebert passed away in 2013, and that Gallo is picking a fight with a dead film critic.”).

I’m not here to pick fights with anybody. Honestly, I’ve given a lot of other films credit that they didn’t deserve. But this one? Not so much. Its unimaginative plot is given the semblance of originality through an irregular nonlinear narrative structure, but that doesn’t make up for making a film that is a sad slog through human misery.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #72 of The Swampflix Podcast: Romantic Escapes from Occupied France & Trouble Every Day (2001)

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Welcome to Episode #72 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our seventy-second episode, Brandon and CC close out the year with a discussion of fancy-schmancy French cinema. They discuss four escapist romances directed by Claude Autant-Lara during Germany’s WWII occupation of France. Also, CC makes Brandon watch Claire Denis’s New French Extremity horror Trouble Every Day (2001). Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– CC Chapman & Brandon Ledet