1996 ‘Nénette et Boni’ Directed by Claire Denis
Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents' divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There's a problem that they must confront.
不知不觉爱上你, 兄兄妹妹
"She's zen—she's killer zen."
An indolent pizza van operator subsisting on unbridled sexual fantasies (Grégoire Colin) is reunited with his headstrong teenage sister (Alice Houri) via her accidental pregnancy.
In the third of nine screenwriting collaborations dating back to 1988, director Claire Denis teamed up with Jean-Pol Fargeau for Nenette and Boni (Nénette et Boni). As with their previous efforts that I've seen (No Fear, No Die and 35 Shots of Rum), the script is austerely minimal and discontinuous in nature—hardly a story so much as a host of striking, more or less discrete moments that eddy about in defiance of a traditional narrative arc. These snapshots are captured with supple grace by cinematographer Agnès Godard (also working on her…
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…
i loved how boni’s aggressive horniness and the baker’s wife’s exaggerated (projected) sexuality were diffused in a single fantasy-shattering interaction when boni asks for a long, hot baguette (wink) and she responds with, “they’re all the same size.”
35mm. BAM.
Even better than I remembered. Denis' practice of cutting without signposting from "objective"/real to "subjective"/fantasy scenes or shots is born here (it recalls Buñuel but is more radical)--reaching its peak in BEAU TRAVAIL and L'INTRUS. Also, the first Denis film with a strong sense of humor: the scenes of Colin fantasizing about "la boulangère" have a hilarious, hyperbolic mise en scène (pink and powder blue predominate--as do soft, satin- and fur-like textures). Best sonic detail: Colin concludes his erotic reverie in bed (a fantasy that has been accompanied by a slightly mystifying gurgling sound), and then, with a big smile on his face, reaches over and gently strokes his new (stolen) Krups coffeemaker--which, all along, has been the source of the incongruous sound. So funny. Docked a half-star for an absurd reason: it is a film that is literally in the shadow of (because it immediately preceded) one of the greatest works in all of cinema, BEAU TRAVAIL.
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.…
U.S. Go Home is probably the better film, but this is where Claire Denis as we know her today fully emerges, mixing her early knack for unorthodox framing of bodies and elliptical editing patterns with the fully sensualized approach that would peak with her very next movie. The plot here is both circumspect and impossible to miss, with insinuations about the father of Nénette's unborn child of a sort that Denis would make more yet more horrifically explicit nearly two decades later with Bastards, and the Freudian/Oedipal tones of Boni's abandonment issues are likewise easy to psychologically unpack.
But the power here comes from how Denis floats around these core aspects, looping around and between each sibling as if caught…
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…
Did not expect:
a). Vincent Gallo to play the bastion of stability
or
b). There to be a literal Chekhov's Gun
The pizza-fucking, however, was predictable.
For some reason, I have trouble connecting with Claire Denis’ work pre-Beau Travail. I’ve yet to see Chocolat, but the ones I have seen from her early period just haven’t done much for me. As is the case with Nenette and Boni. Don’t get me wrong, this film (really, all of her work) is well made and has its share of positive qualities. This one just felt sort of messy and rather unenjoyable to boot. I didn’t really give a shit about these characters until the end but by then things had gotten so sad I didn’t have time to enjoy them. There’s some solid camerawork here and the writing is sprinkled with elements of realism and teenage/young adult angst that…
Alguém lembra ainda da época em que a Denis fazia filme com o Vincent Gallo e não com o Benny Safdie, época em que você ficava sabendo da existência de algum filme dela mudando de canal na madrugada e não por cobertura de festival em site, época em que os filmes dela não pareciam com nada que estava sendo feito na França ao invés de parecerem com tudo que está sendo feito em todas as partes do mundo?
Eu lembro, e ainda lembro muito bem da porrada que levei na cara quando me deparei com isto numa madrugada no Telecine Emotion. Ver os filmes do Kar-wai fez um bem danado à Denis; ver os filmes da Denis não fez nem…
madame claire denis sure does know how to get under my skin and take my senses for a ride
