Slow violence

In the second week of the Northwest Film Center’s “The Lyrical Space of Claire Denis” film series, audiences will have a chance to see where the filmmaker ended up 25 years after her debut feature film.

Since 1988’s Chocolat (nope, not that one), Denis’ renown has grown as her filmmaking has matured, but her grasp on both the real and the ethereal remains firm.

“Her films aren’t like anyone else’s movies,” said Nick Bruno, the NWFC’s public relations and marketing associate. “They’re topical and yet…in a very personal mode of storytelling.”

Denis also has a knack for shocking (almost inexplicable) endings, as in her films Beau Travail and White Material.

“[The endings] are not only unexpected, but they’re jarring in that there’s no rational explanation for what just happened,” Bruno said. “You can…[explain] what it might mean in several different ways, and yet there’s no way to pin down meaning specifically.”

The Vanguard previewed two of Denis’ newest films ahead of their screenings at the center.

35 Shots of Rum (2008)

Saturday, May 11, 7 p.m.
Sunday, May 12, 4:45 p.m.

Denis is known for her commentaries on race, war and colonialism, but her uncanny ability to depict day-to-day reality is what makes her work so powerful.

The film centers on Lionel and Josephine, a father and daughter living a simple middle-class life in a Paris apartment. They’re about as close as relatives can get, to the point that watching the scenes of their mutual routine feels like intruding on a sacred ritual.

The movie is all about these shared moments, the intimacy of an unspoken bond. Even when the two are separate, there’s an unmistakable person-shaped void that bends the room like light around a black hole.

This balance is disrupted by the moody neighbor boy Noe, whose greasy hair and pencil-thin mustache Josephine finds alluring. There aren’t any pratfalls or cathartic outbursts between the parties in question. Denis grounds 35 Shots and its small problems in the moment-to-moment banality of life.

Staring out the window of a train. Small talk over dinner made in the new rice cooker. A moment of solitude on the couch punctuated by flatulence. These are the scenes between the big events in typical movies, but they’re the minutes and hours that make up most of our lives—and most of this film.

Though 35 Shots of Rum has an almost entirely black cast, Denis’ usual social and racial commentary simmers beneath the surface of the film rather than boiling over. The focus is on the intense relationship between Lionel and Josephine and that familiar tension between loving someone and letting them go.

This is a quiet, ambiguous film. Even though most will probably watch it with a friend or a loved one, there’s something about Denis’ style that gives one the inescapable feeling of being alone in the dark.

White Material (2009)
Sunday, May 12, 7 p.m.

If 35 Shots of Rum makes the ordinary extraordinary, White Material does the reverse.

Isabelle Huppert plays Maria, a French woman who refuses to abandon her coffee plantation in the face of a violent civil war in a nonspecific African country. Bodies line dirt roads, child soldiers patrol the area and still Maria will not budge.

As warnings on the radio become more severe, the locals clear out for fear of being caught between the crossfire of the warring factions. Excepting Maria, those who stay are forced to by poverty or sick loved ones.

Doom is written on the wall. This dread of inevitable oblivion permeates White Material.

Even with the war closing in, Denis manages to cultivate ordinary human moments, bloodstained though they may be. Children run out of school gleeful and cheering—holding machetes and rifles.

We see a lot of Maria in the normal routine of processing coffee beans on the farm, interrupted once by the discovery of a severed goat head in the harvest—a pointed and unmistakable threat.

Maria’s ex-husband, Andre, played by Christophe Lambert, pleads for her to leave with their troubled son. Just as Maria seems at once brave and insane, Andre is both reasonable and cowardly.

Everyone tells Maria that she should leave, including the wounded rebel officer she harbors for a time. She’s tied inexorably to her farm and her land for reasons no one can fathom. We’re reminded of that famous hermit who vowed to stick it out on Mount St. Helens despite warnings of an impending eruption.

While the content is vastly different from 35 Shots of Rum, White Material similarly lives and dies by its genuine human moments. Denis has a way of making a terrible conflict seem everyday—horrific in its commonality.

Bodies continue to pile up throughout the film, but very little violence is depicted onscreen. The result is a movie that shows us what surrounds that violence, and it is all the more haunting for it.