The central themes of most of Claire Denis’ cinema come readily to mind: colonialism, racism, sexuality and gender. These latter two are present in all her films. It may seem a lazy comparison, given that both are middle-aged white women directors who belong in the pantheon of masters of our time, but in this way, Denis is undeniably like Jane Campion. Both seem to get off on being sexually transgressive, skewering gender norms, imbuing their prurient female protagonists with the same aggressive horniness so often given to men on the big screen, filming men in very little dress to reverse the “male gaze” and generally inverting the gender expectations within the cinematic medium. They are quite different in the ways that they approach these tendencies, and, though I generally prefer Campion’s brasher near-perverse style—hello there, Holy Smoke!, you lewd and hilarious work of art—Denis’ quieter subversion is often quite effective, perhaps never more so than in Nénette et Boni.
Here, with her final early-career film prior to her mega-breakout with Beau Travail a couple of years later, Denis offers us a glimpse of this subversive and efficacious approach to gender and sexuality. The film revolves around the two titular characters, especially Boni, played by Denis regular Grégoire Colin. He is the older brother to Nénette (Alice Houri), though the two are not close and seem to have been separated by their parents’ divorce, Boni preferring his mother and Nénette her father.
Boni’s life is straightforward. He lives in the home left to him after his mother’s premature demise to illness. Every day, he goes to work, mostly as a food truck operator hawking wood-fired pizzas to the working-class denizens of ‘90s Marseille. But he and his friends also moonlight as transporters of stolen goods that they pick up at the city’s famous port. Denis smartly does not get too in the weeds explicating Boni’s smuggling—the film is about his relationship to his sister—but it seems that he is quite small-time, as the only goods we see Boni transporting are fishing rods and the payment he receives is a coffee maker. Besides work, Boni is the doting owner of a pet bunny. He also has a vivid fantasy life. Mainly, he journals about the many, many graphic sexual acts he would perform on the local baker’s wife if ever given the chance. It seems a third of Nénette et Boni is simply Denis cutting from a shirtless Colin staring intently at nothing to the inside of his head, where an elaborate sexual fantasy with the baker’s wife is in the process of playing out.
Nénette, on the other hand, is a minor who flees boarding school to show up at Boni’s home, much to her brother’s displeasure. She is pregnant and she does not want the baby. Boni is torn about the pregnancy and the fate of the baby; this is the real backbone of the plot. While the runtime is mostly dedicated to Boni’s ejaculations while picturing pastries and the baker’s wife’s “biscuit”—that is truly a scene and a line from Nénette et Boni and Denis sticks the landing—the fate of the baby and what it means that Nénette and Boni feel the way they do about it is what the film is about. This is the Denis approach to gender and sexuality: quiet, slow, playing out in subtle gestures and silences. She makes the viewer work for it, in a way that Campion does not, which probably comes down to a Francophone filmmaker trusting her audience more than an Anglophone one can. By the final scene of the film, both Nénette and Boni have had complete character arcs, with Boni’s transformation being particularly stunning and satisfying. And that, too, is a Denis staple: the film ends and hours later, the viewer says “Aha, now I get it!”
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