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Claire Denis

OBJECTS OF DESIRE: THE CINEMA OF CLAIRE DENIS at TIFF Cinematheque (350 King West), from Friday (October 11) to November 10 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. tiff.net. Rating: NNNNN


Claire Denis has come to the Toronto Film Festival to screen her new film, Bastards, and do a little local press in advance of a TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of her work, Objects Of Desire: The Cinema Of Claire Denis. But mostly we’re talking about Egypt.

Upon our introduction, Denis asks about the button I’m wearing in support of Tarek Loubani and John Greyson. She’s dismayed to hear of their detention in an Egyptian prison (it would be almost another month before their release) and offers to wear the button herself.

“I was supposed to go to Cairo in a week for a retrospective of my films,” she says, “and I received a mail that said ‘Please come only in December.’ I think now is difficult for them, for Egyptians.”

The Toronto retrospective should prove far less contentious. TIFF will screen all of Denis’s features, including her rarely seen documentaries about director Jacques Rivette (The Nightwatchman) and choreographer Mathilde Monnier (Vers Mathilde).

Since making an international splash with her first feature, 1988’s Chocolat, Denis has worked in multiple genres and explored an assortment of themes. She’s a merciless filmmaker, willing to show people at their worst: the cockfighters of No Fear No Die, the ticking-bomb characters of I Can’t Sleep, the sexually repressed soldiers of her Billy Budd adaptation, Beau Travail.

But she’s also capable of tenderness and great compassion, as seen in the sibling relationship of Nénette Et Boni, the feature-length pas de deux between Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon in Vendredi Soir and the tangled family relationships of 35 Shots Of Rum.

In Bastards, one of her nastier films, Denis somehow extends this compassion to every single one of the characters, all of whom are trapped in a mandala of bloody vengeance.

“I don’t know, really, why the film deals with such strong pain and suffering,” she says. “For me, there was not even a suspicion of ‘too dark, too taboo, too cruel.’ No, while making the film I was cheering for the characters. I didn’t try to shock. It’s not my aim.”

Whereas with a project like Trouble Every Day, Denis’s full-on horror movie about researchers who accidentally turn themselves into cannibalistic sex vampires, shock was definitely on her mind.

“Trouble, yeah,” she laughs. “I was afraid myself. I was asked, ‘Can you dare to make a genre movie?’ And I said, ‘Don’t push me, because if I do a genre movie, I will go in my direction.’ So I made it, but it was even frightening for me, you know? Except that I had the trust of the actors, of course.”

Trouble Every Day – screening November 3 in TIFF’s retrospective – is unique in Denis’s filmography: it has no soft spot for its monsters. In her other films, when things get dark we’re allowed to understand what drives their most loathsome characters. Even in Bastards, she admits, “I wanted to hold everyone in my arms.”

And though plenty of critics (myself included) would classify Bastards as neo-noir, Denis places the film in a different genre.

“I really admire those films made by Kurosawa in the years after the war,” she says, citing the missing-gun drama Stray Dog and the kidnapping thriller High And Low.

“When Japan was shocked, you know? Toshiro Mifune’s always this really good hero, and yet in the end he’s the victim of power and money, or envy and jealousy. He gives in.”

But that’s noir, I say.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, “but there is no redemption. It just ends. And I think a lot of people need to get a sort of redemption from film – something to go home with.

“It can start very badly,” she explains, “with a lot of fighting, a lot of death, a lot of bleeding, but for a reason we can understand. And then the characters can be redeemed. And this, for me, is not moral. It’s completely amoral. Unless it’s a joke like [Quentin Tarantino’s] Django, you know? Like a fable, a parable. A fairy tale.”

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

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