TIFF 'In Conversation': Barry Jenkins' and Claire Denis' mutual admiration session ponders violence and the value of trust in film

By Liam Lacey

The second of the Toronto International Film Festival’s In Conversation With… instalments may have been remote, but it was definitely personal. 

Barry Jenkins, the 40-year-old African-American director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, interviewed his idol, 74-year-old French director, Claire Denis, from her kitchen in Paris. The experience felt almost voyeuristic, as they exchanged mutual admiration and affection. 

Denis, who made her first film, Chocolat (1988) at 39, has made a dozen more features, often focusing on post-colonialism (she spent her childhood in Africa). She is admired for her elliptical narratives, light-on-dialogue scripts, and integration of colour, sound and camera placement for mesmerizing effect in studies of aloneness.  

Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson in Claire Denis’ High Life

In recent years, she has often been favourably name-checked  by hip younger filmmakers (Josh Safdie, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig). And, of course, there’s Mati Diop, one of her former actresses, who she describes as like a daughter, and who directed the Cannes 2019 Grand Prix winner, director of Atlantics. 

For her part,  Denis remains a film omnivore (“I’m only happy when I’m watching film I like,” she told Jenkins) and popular music devotee. She sought out Outkast’s Andre Benjamin and was working with the Canadian pop star The Weeknd on an upcoming project.

But Jenkins has been a particularly enthusiastic advocate for her work. He has talked to Denis before, for an upcoming Criterion DVD release of her most celebrated film, Beau Travail (1999). It’s a loosely adapted version of Herman Melville’s novella, Billy Budd, set in the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, accompanied by the score of Benjamin Britten’s opera based on the same book. 

And last year, when Denis was promoting her English-language debut High Life, with Robert Pattinson as an astronaut, Jenkins interviewed her for The New York Times, calling her “the world’s greatest living filmmaker.”

Claire Denis

Thursday night’s virtual conversation revolved around two sets of film clips, from Jenkins’ Moonlight – a swimming lesson, a fight – and clips from Denis’ Beau Travail, of soldiers in morning exercises, and then two men circling each other in preparation for a struggle. 

The attention to bodies, faces, colours, made the influence obvious, even more than he was aware, Jenkins said.
“The greatest influence I took was the mastery of simplicity. In that clip from your work … such mastery, such tension.”

Denis spoke about the kinds of intuitive leaps that guided her.

“When I did location scouting in Djibouti, where the French legion was training In the desert, these soldiers were training in this incredibly hot desert. For me, I could not see the heat. I see only this sort of elegance and reality of people training, not as a ballet, but as a sort of dance before a fight.”

When she returned to Paris, she wrote while listening to Benjamin Britten because it “gave me the feeling I was on a ship with the sailors, together with those guys.”

Jenkins, who described Denis as “a magician” who explores areas of trust and freedom, says he has long struggled to figure out what her “trick” is. He mentioned his own swimming lesson scene in Moonlight, about struggling to “concentrate so many things in a movement… A man teaches a boy to swim. I felt that scene was about so much more, almost a spiritual transference between characters.”

 Denis responded by talking about the scene from Moonlight: “In a strange way, I learned to swim like that. I was the oldest. My father told me to trust the water and it told me to trust myself. I’m very moved even to tell that, because I remember, my life changed at that moment. I’ve been able to be alone in the sea, to manage on my own … It’s so much more than learning to swim. It’s learning to live really, trusting someone that gives you trust in yourself. That’s so important.”

After finishing shooting Moonlight, Jenkins said, he was unable to sleep. And, at five in the morning, put on a DVD of Beau Travail, a film he hadn’t watched in years. As soon as he saw a scene of two men circling each other in preparation for a fight, he swore, recognizing his debt to the scene.

 “Some images are so powerful they make themselves inside you. You’re a woman, but you seem to understand how masculinity corrupts men so well. How much was Beau Travail about masculinity and what it does to men?”

 “I think that women, even little girls, understand this necessary opposition. To ‘be a man,’ you know, you understand you have to do that, it’s a sort of fate. 

“I’m not young and strong, but if I see a fight in the street – because young boys from the college are often fighting in the street – I have to go and try to stop it. I can’t stand it.  

“For me, it’s something any woman can feel easily. It’s not difficult because women have other ways of beating themselves up, not in the same type of fights, but with that cruelty, that willingness to destroy. It’s something that men and women share in a different way.”

 At the end of the session, Jenkins’ read a couple of questions from the virtual audience, including one about how Denis conquered doubt to make her first film. She echoed Jenkins’ theme of the importance of trust. 

“I don’t think you can make a film fighting against yourself, against the elements. It’s a crew of trust, the equipment, the wardrobe. It’s an unbelievable moment of trust. That’s why filmmakers are so depressed at the end of shooting, you know like orphans. Something is gone, that group-of-trust. The only way to fight fear is to start believing in trust.”

 After a long answer about the differences between French and American cinema, and her various influences and collaborators (Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch), she added:
“If I can say something consistent in my life, the first time I saw a film made by [Yusijiro] Ozu, I realize it was like the iconic figure of cinema. He invented family stories, a way of filmmaking … a testimony of love, of loneliness, the fact that life is not soft on human beings. But that doesn’t mean it has to be violent.  And I really do – every day I say thanks to Ozu.. and I’m sure it was not simple to do the thing he did.”

 “That’s how we talk about you,” Jenkins told her. “And it’s profoundly moving and special to think of you the way you think of Ozu. But understand that you are not a myth but you are a very whole human being and the things you go through, we go through.”

 “You sent a message to me in a bottle. I feel reassured,” Denis replied. “I feel stronger.”