The Color of Home
Claire Denis’s maiden film Chocolat opens on a wide gray slice of sea and sky. Two silhouettes distantly at play in the surf do little to relieve the visual anomie. The camera curves slowly rightward, away from drear emptiness toward green-fringed shore, to stop at a young white woman, watching. Cut to closeup: a child lazes on his back in the sand, a transparent skin of seawater rising to caress, then slide away from, his rich brown flesh. Soon a grown man lies down beside him, and together their bodies form a dark continent that fills Denis’s frame, anchoring our (and the observing woman’s) gaze. In effortless, elegant cinematic diction, Denis makes us experience how, for this as-yet-unidentified voyeur, people of color—color itself—signal harbor, a homeport that draws her in from those washed-out, un-demarcated spaces at the horizon, back into childhood memory of “a perfect life” in French-governed West Africa during the 1950s.
Chocolat‘s vehicle for time-travel is, in the present, a young woman lacking in substance, a bit distracted and adrift, as if she’s misplaced her life’s Baedeker. Clutching her father’s old sketchbook of African scenes like a compass that has ceased to point true north, the adult France (Mireille Perrier) trips into the past, where she seems at first only audience to a quiet playing-out of paradise lost. The little girl France (Cecile Ducasse) first learns and is exiled from the color of home in “the last house on earth,” as the previous colonialists—defeated Germans who now lie in a nearby graveyard—dubbed the sprawling bungalow that stands so solitarily in the Cameroons flatlands. But Chocolat (’88), like Denis’s S’enfout la mort (’90; U.S. ’92), ultimately shapes itself into a potent morality play that climaxes with the rupture of uniquely symbiotic relationships—between France and the Black houseboy Protée (Isaach de Bankholé) in the first film, between money-minder Dah (Bankholé) and Jocelyn the cockfighter (Alex Descas) in the second—propelling the witness into motion, out on the road as a lost or found soul.
Chocolat is all devouring space, sunbaked, scrubby expanses that eat away at the substantiality of figures in the landscape, and at the forms on which whites depend for emotional and social orientation. Visually, Protée stands out, solidly inhabiting his strong, dark body, filling out his flesh with no slack. The whites seem less at home in their skins, fallen away from or unsure of their true shapes, and thus more reliant on layers that signal identity. Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), the ex-seminarian who infects France’s Eden, reads an account of the violent vertigo experienced by those cast back into enclaves of whites after having lived among Blacks for a long time: “The white skin color evokes something akin to death.”
For Aimée, France’s mother (Giulia Boschi), Protée becomes a kind of axis around which she orbits, though the motion is always masked by the protocols of chatelaine and houseboy. In the willed silences and the kind of sexual suspension maintained between them, Aimée and Protée guard a necessary order and equilibrium. That balance eventually collapses, done in by a fallen priest’s killing honesty. By naming out loud the existential dynamics of color and by making himself at home in spaces reserved for members of each race, Luc uncontains the players and their stage, so that they become vulnerable to an African landscape, i.e., state of mind, that leaches them of vitality and any sense of direction. Aimée crouches in the darkness, reaching out to grasp Protée’s ankle as he closes the shutters on African night—as though she might fall off the world without the lifeline of his flesh. But that connection would hamstring the Black man, and he rejects it. In S’en fout la mort, another white woman kneels at the feet of an uprooted Black man, inviting him into the limbo of lost identity—and Jocelyn, his cock blinded, falls for the color of death.
Throughout Chocolat, Protée nourishes France quite subversively, as though he means to fill her up with the forbidden fruit of Africa: the child gravely chews up ant sandwiches and solemnly takes in the blood her mentor ritually smears on her wrist from the bodies of a slaughtered cow and chicken. Food and the way this Black man and his white charge share it both mocks and frees them from their designated places in the social order. (Denis’s “chocolat” has two meanings: to have dark skin and to be cheated.) After Protée stands his ground against Aimée’s pass, she has her husband strip him of his job as houseboy. In turn, Protée brutally betrays France’s trust, deliberately severing the umbilical connection between them and branding the child forever homeless. In S’en fout la mort, every time the coveted wife and jealous son of his white “father” (Jean-Claude Brialy as the stingy restaurateur, Ardennes) dine on defeated cock, Jocelyn becomes more disinherited, deracinated. They and the inimical spaces he inhabits eat him, diminishing his sanity and manhood bite by bite.
In S’en fout la mort, Dah—in voiceover—immediately identifies himself and Jocelyn as Black, though the two are camouflaged in the murky interior of their truck, speeding to a midnight rendezvous to buy fighting cocks. The new world this African and West Indian have entered is always dark or shaded bluegray, constricted by steel and concrete. Their ultimate destination is an abandoned amusement park, a sort of heavy-metal factory meant to manufacture fun, now advertising the “gates of hell,” Jocelyn’s arena, and a noisy, neon-lit disco operated by Ardennes’s son (Christopher Buchholz). The Blacks and their exotic birds are housed in a cramped, windowless warren somewhere beneath Ardennes’s tacky truck stop restaurant. These environs are as dangerous to strangers in a strange land as was Chocolat‘s Africa: here, Jocelyn and Dah are not reliable bastions of vibrant color in engulfing light and space, but black-clad and -fleshed shadows easily swallowed up in nighttown.
Like Protée’s armoring silence and sense of protocol, Jocelyn’s monastic commitment to his birds serves as fetish against coming apart, death. The gorgeously hued cock that is Jocelyn’s totem and homeground is named “S’en fout la mort”—No Fear, No Die (Denis says that such protective fetish phrases are often graffitied on buses in Africa or the Antilles). The trainer’s face firms into austere lines of self-contained beauty as he works the fighting cocks: his hands moving them rapidly from side to side, or whisk-brooming them around in circles like feathered lightshows. He is his own home in these moments; he won’t let the restaurateur, his mother’s one-time lover back in the islands, touch the hot red-copper and deep-black feathers of No Fear, No Die—that touch could tip the balance that keeps Jocelyn upright and intact, exactly the “rape” Protée feared from Aimée’s caress.
But it’s Toni (Solveig Dommartin), Ardennes’s blonde-maned wife and his son’s mistress, who invades and fatally unsettles Jocelyn’s bird sanctuary. With No Fear, No Die wiped out and the colorful ritual of cockfighting reduced to money-driven bloodsport, Jocelyn takes the Oedipal tumble, not for a flesh-and-blood woman of color but a white abstraction wrapped in a leopard-skin coat. By the time he freezes the frenzied crowd around the cockpit to strut and chant the beauty of his latest alter ego—a white-feathered, gold-ruffed cock named after his dream girl—Jocelyn has ceased to live inside his own skin. He’s dead and gone before the white “brother” who’s offered to “dye his dick” for Toni’s love administers the coup de grace.
In the penultimate moments of S’en fout la mort, Dah performs a priestly ceremony—tenderly making the kind of magic that will bring Jocelyn’s scattered spirit back into his body. Washing his friend’s naked flesh, he baptizes him back into his true form and clothes him in the rich, sustaining hues and sounds of his homeland, storying Jocelyn to rest in the cool green beneath the breadfruit trees on an island where the coconuts are heavy, full of milk, cocks are crowing, and his beautiful Black mother does a little dance to her Stevie Wonder tape.
By means of such seamless identification with displaced persons, the skill with which she practices the subtle and dangerous art of sharing skins with men and women, Blacks and whites, and her sharp eye for landscape as a state of soul, Claire Denis proves herself to be a cinematic cosmopolitan, anchored and at home wherever her movies live.
Kathleen Murphy is in-house writer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
