I turned on Claire Denis’ Nenette and Boni and minutes into it, I realized this was going to be another one of those films by her where I have to make sense of the barrage of messy little particles for scenes and also put up with the working class grayness of its’ colorless palette. One-third of the way in, I became substantially more emotionally invested when I found some grounding. Nenette (Alice Houri) and Boni (Gregoire Colin) are estranged siblings, affected from bad blood from their parents’ vague long ago divorce. The sister is pregnant yet abject to any kind of mature responsibility. The brother has holed up at his deceased mothers’ house.

Away from his pizza job, Boni fantasizes…

I love it how Claire Denis takes a tough scenario and injects it with sensuality and lyricism, turning what in British hands would be kitchen sink drama, into a work of inimitable beauty. Where Ken Loach would double down on the hopelessness of Nenette and Boni’s lives, Denis, without trivialising the harshness, finds a line of bliss and mines it with ravishing colours, eroticism and editing like liquid. Where a gritty drama would normally reach for harsh silences, she locates the slow melancholy pulse of Tindersticks’ music, taking the bitter edge off everything with its subdued croon. The end result is a discernible reality transformed into a fantasy as ripe as Boni’s outrageous sexual daydreams, as he nuzzles up to…

It's a ghostly world where the only money made comes from selling phone cards and faulty lighting equipment made in Taiwan, Boni shoots pellets at the neighbourhood cats that sit on his lawn and Nénette's got that typical teenage apathy toward responsibilities that gets them into trouble in all the ways they expected it to. The two collide in ways only brother and sister know how—both Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri have played the vicious sibling rivalry out before in Denis's previous US Go Home—and their toxicity towards each other doesn't paint a nice symphony for the surrounding neighbours. He speaks in curious monologues to himself and is about 3 points off being admitted and she wants out, of something.…

"She's my sister. Watch it." - Boni

The direction of "Nénette et Boni" (1996) is Claire Denis's first leap into surreal subjectivity that will be perfected in her next film "Beau Travail". Like "U.S. Go Home" (1994) and with two of the same lead actors, Denis tackles sexual desire among youth and sibling relationships. But she also looks at the difficulties of the fractured modern family by looking the effects of divorce, the effects of the death of a parent, and teen pregnancy.

Boni, played by the exceptional Denis regular Grégoire Colin, is a young man who owns a pizza food truck and helps transport stolen goods on the side. However, he is introduced with a reading of diary about…

More of an experience than a traditional story, Denis captures adolescence through dreamy, fragmented visuals that function as highly charged repositories for the moods and rhythms of youth. Her characters exist on the tremulous edges of fantasy and hard-boiled reality, creating a world of sensations from which they project their desires. 

Boni is a well-spring of pheromones and wet-dreams. Nenette, his sister, is 15-years old and pregnant. She will infringe upon her brother's solipsistic existence, push aside his fantasies, and wise him up to his fraternal responsibilities. 

Boni and Nenette together form a prism of contradictory teen emotion, one side steeped in autoerotic fantasies, the other side struggling with an immediate crisis for what those fantasies create, if acted upon.…

the light mellowly cascades with the shadows as it dances along the walls, grazes across the skin during brief respites on the mattress. soliloquies of sexual fantasy hold the space of an appetite for someone. it's a hunger that washes over the body. but it's also a desire extinguished before the urge to act on it involve another. so food is also a supporting feature. pastries, burgers, and pizzas appear from time to time. there is the regular consumption of fast food, bad food—cheap, delicious, quick (one scene shows a line of bread until there is a bun then a cleavage). much like Nenette and Boni's initial impulses, they're not good for long. and within the interspersed family drama, their…

Denis as an auteur is the hardest nut to crack, because it is hard to pin down what she is trying to achieve, despite a fully formed sense of style. Between this film and Beau Travail, Grégoire Colin emerges as a quasi-sexual muse, spending a lot of time shirtless and murmuring naive masturbatory fantasies. The film has some great moments, like the super close-up on puff pastries and the scene scored to “God Only Knows.” Okay, so all of these are connected to the buxom baker's wife. I love the scene where Boni finds himself on a date with Bruni-Tedeschi, and suddenly she starts spouting girlish banalities. Boni turns speechless, completely unable to accept her as a real person outside…