Directed by Claire Denis • 1999 • France
Starring Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.
Up Next in Directed by Claire Denis
-
White Material
Directed by Claire Denis • 2009 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert, Isaach De BankoléIn WHITE MATERIAL, the great contemporary French filmmaker Claire Denis, known for her restless, intimate dramas, introduces an unforgettably crazed character. Played by a ferocious Isabelle...
-
Let the Sunshine In
Directed by Claire Denis • 2017 • France
Starring Juliette Binoche, Xavier Beauvois, Philippe KaterineTwo luminaries of French cinema, Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche, unite for the first time in this piercing look at the elusive nature of true love, and the extent to which we are willing to ...
