Catching the work of Claire Denis, one might be forgiven for expecting the acclaimed French director to be a most forbidding creature. She is, after all, a very old-fashioned high modernist. Her films are scholarly, laden with literary references and driven by a very pure cinematic aesthetic. The long, lingering shots that have become her signature are self-consciously cerebral.
I’m a bit taken aback when I meet her at the Edinburgh Film Festival, armed with a plate of shortbread and demanding that the stuff be banned on account of its one-way journey to the hips. She immediately seems more accessible and humorous than her film output. “No, no. I’m French. I don’t have much of a sense of humour. I’m a very serious person,” she comments later, by way of a defence.
Certainly, her work is far from frothy. Having spent most of her childhood travelling colonial Africa, the Parisian-born director assisted such arthouse luminaries as Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch before striking out on her own with the semi-autobiographical Chocolat in 1988. Since then she has fashioned a unique body of work, often less like conventional film than visual poetry. Her 1999 masterpiece, Beau Travail, inspired by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, is a hypnotic cavalry movie that seems to aspire to dance more than any other art form and plays with themes that have become familiar over the course of her eight feature films – sexuality, repression, marginalisation and colonialism.
Her latest film, The Intruder is drawn from a multitude of sources, including Robert Louis Stevenson, The Searchers, the South Seas painting of Paul Gauguin and a forty page essay by philosopher Jean Luc Nancy on his heart transplant.
“When I told him I wanted to make a film of it, he couldn’t quite get it,” she explains. “He thought I meant a documentary or visual essay of some kind. But no, I wanted to make a feature film.”
It’s perhaps understandable that Nancy was intrigued by such a notion. The film takes the form of a global trek by a 68 year-old man (played by Denis regular Michel Subor) in search of a long lost son in the Pacific and a heart transplant. Nothing, however, about his quest is certain as Denis piles up her gorgeous elaborate tracking shots. How on earth, I wonder, does she and long-time director of photography, Agnes Godard plan these out?
“We don’t,” she laughs. “We just keep looking until we find something. Like with the scene where the baby opens his eyes, we just had to keep going in order to get one short but very important shot in the context of the film.
Her highly idiosyncratic style has been furthered by having her own band of players. Like many of her films The Intruder features performances by Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin and Beatrice Dalle, who shows up as the Queen of the northern hemisphere.
“Beatrice is a classic muse and she has fascinated me since Betty Blue but she herself is wary of being a muse for male directors. She is extraordinarily beautiful but she does not want to be a fantasy object. Nowadays she does not read scripts, she just wants to know what you need her to do and then she says yes or no. On this film when I told her 'I just want you to be the Queen of the northern hemisphere and surrounded by wild dogs' she was happy to do it without any further explanation.”