Claire Denis and the Angular Gyrus

Since I’ve been getting flak for not loving Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (The Intruder reviewed here before) I decided to check out a 1996 Denis film Nénette et Boni. Unlike L’Intrus the dialog of this film is incredibly strong and there’s more of it. Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri who play the siblings Boniface and Nénette respectively perform magnificently.

Denis uses images with the same versatility as she does in L’Intrus. But for me these cinematic movements went much further than they ever did in L'Intrus. In Nénette et Boni the image, the displacements of desire, love, and relationships are intensely potent because they go till the very edge of meaning but they deftly step away before falling into vagueness.

Moments and scenes are connected sometimes by story, at other times by image and yet others by dialog. This kind of loose association leaves us free (and presumably Denis to create without the suffocation of a formula) to reflect, digest, and revel in the many gorgeous moments of this film. The film begins with a man trying to sell phone cards to a group of Africans in Marseille. It cuts to Nénette swimming in a pool. Later when Nénette hangs by a phone booth we see the card vendor again; he is trying to talk a man into photographing his phone card. He claims his daughter loves phone cards and he’d like to show her this card. Nénette as we’ll later find out is pregnant. She’s also a daughter who sided with her father after a divorce while Boni her brother lived with his mother.

Boniface first appears to us reading from his smutty journal. In rather Bataillesque fashion he swears over his mother’s grave to procure the baker’s wife. Vincent Gallo plays the baker and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi his wife who in Boni’s words is "built like a brick shithouse." A fact that doesn’t stop Boni from investing his energies in her. Scenes in the bakery that involve Tedeschi and the many imaginary scenes that run through Boni’s head are priceless. In the way they are shot, in how little is said and how much conveyed.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s performance moves along without cause for note until a chance encounter with Boni in the mall. They sit together for a coffee. She talks nervously about a radio program she’s heard on pheromones, on how men, women, animals, truffles, and truffle pigs are all emitting this scent out in the ether that carries no smell but all these signals. As she talks and Boni listens wordlessly we see her for what she is, an ordinary baker’s ordinary wife and not as the fantastic larger than life female that Boni has been imagining her to be. The scene is delicate, in perfect balance. The acting exactly right, the dialog just taking us as far as we need to go. Yet later alone Boni's imagination once more gets the better of him.

The real story of the film is of course that of Nénette the sister and Boni her brother. Denis builds this story as the rest of the film brick by brick. With scenes of violence, anger, tenderness, and memory between the siblings. A scene of Boni on the beach in another day and age, a photo of the mother, enough to guide us into the story and see it through the eyes of the siblings. Enough. And this was my problem with L’Intrus, there wasn’t enough. In that film the father-son relationship was obscured by noise. In this one both the noise and the silence work together to tell us the real story. The Tindersticks soundtrack is not continuous, not overwhelming. The film itself both art and story.

Denis is an artist. And she uses that license to push on the edges of what a story is in L’Intrus. In Nénette et Boni the metaphors, images, words, and songs are all in the service of the story. No doubt those of you who love L’Intrus will tell me it’s just me who doesn’t get the metaphors there. Possibly. We don’t know yet that there is a sliding scale involved in the comprehension of metaphors. Science only knows so far that the angular gyrus is located at the "junction of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision." One day we might know enough of the basic functioning of this part of our brain to submit the metaphorical understanding of Denis’ films to further testing. Maybe the difference between those who prefer L’Intrus to Nénette et Boni stems from the displaced axis of the angular gyrus.