Perfect Analysis

I'm still speechless over this magnificent film that I watched several years ago. Everytime I try to write up an ode to the film, I become paralyzed by the end image in my mind's eye: Boni holding and kissing his sister Nenette's infant son. Since the feelings I feel can't be transliterated into words, read this instead:


NENETTE AND BONI

by Dennis Grunes, 1996


Claire Dénis, the spry youngster, is exactly my age; I really should have more sympathy for her. But I found her highly regarded Chocolat (1988) arid and I Can`t Sleep (1994) negligible. I am much more in tune, however, with Nénette et Boni, which in fact is one of the finest films I’ve seen about marginal contemporary youth. It took the Best Film prize at Locarno, where its two stars, Alice Houri and Grégoire Colin, also won as Best Actress and Best Actor.

Trenchant, poetic and steelily realistic, the film is very rich, very full —not schematic and message-tagged, like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995). Rather than being driven, like La haine, by attitude and agenda, Nénette et Boni is primarily interested (as we are) in its two main characters, a fifteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old brother. Nénette and Boni—Antoinette and Boniface—are out on their own, their mother deceased, their father the object of one’s fear and of the other’s contempt. Quarrelsomely and painfully, the two children bridge their mutual estrangement only to reach, by the end of the film, another estrangement that sets one of them loose for a life on the streets and gives the other new responsibility. Their tough, vulnerable lives are works-in-progress.

The scene is working-class Marseilles. Seven months pregnant, possibly by her father from whom she has run away, Nénette hides, unannounced, in her brother Boni’s tiny apartment, which he shares with a passive pet rabbit. (The curious, demanding cat that keeps poking through his window is far less to his liking.) A buzz-cut above being a skinhead, Boni works out of a van as a pizza chef; he augments his income as an errand boy for a local gunrunning operation. What expressive filmmaking Dénis marshals to introduce these two. Cutting back and forth between the teenagers, Dénis establishes each in her or his own element while the formal separation this imposes on the two establishes, also, their estrangement. The culmination of this bravura opening movement is testy and explosive. Discovering Nénette in his domain, Boni tosses her out. The boy cherishes his independence and, even more, his privacy — one as a reaction against their father; the other as an opportunity for the unbridled sexual fantasies that accompany his sleep and generous masturbations. Nevertheless, he takes to the streets to retrieve his younger sister, his massive decency as well as some family feeling kicking in. The shell that this boy has built around himself Nénette now threatens to pierce—as she must, for she is in terrible need.

Boni acts his age; in short, he is stubbornly immature. He insists on holding Nénette accountable for "choosing" their father over him (and, implicitly, their dead mother); what else could she have done? Younger, Nénette needed some adult to stabilize her shattered life after the divorce of their parents or the death of their mother — the precise point of decision the film never makes clear. That the family member she went with may since have raped her is only one of the film’s numerous knitted ironies. (Two others: Nénette’s sexual experience likely exceeds her older brother’s; Boni ends up parenting, alone, his sister’s son.) But why does Boni hold this necessary choice against Nénette? Possibly Boni needs the security of believing for his own sake that people really have free and plentiful choices. Helping to make this film savvy is the fact that Dénis holds no such illusion; throughout, there is a subtle though powerful sense that ruin is yawning just underneath both children. Theirs are constantly imperiled lives requiring the utmost effort to keep afloat. Hauntingly, the film opens with Nénette peacefully submerged, as in a dream, in a pool—a key image. For, if her brother’s fantasy is sex, hers is death. Unlike Boni, Nénette doesn’t see much choice in her midst. Dénis balances their views; she understands — as someone her (and my) age should — that there is little choice in life, and, far from relieving us of responsibility, this in fact compounds the value of that responsibility. It is in this context that one must receive, finally, Boni’s kidnap-adoption of Nénette’s infant.

There is a sense of immediacy to this film that perfectly expresses the degree to which the two children constantly seek refuge in the present as their best (though fragile) defense against a potentially crippling, flypaper past. This in-the-momentness precludes the sort of detailed narrative exposition some viewers may be (too) used to; a lot of questions—whats and whys—go unanswered. For instance, consider Nénette’s nonresponse to her brother’s peevish claim that she chose to live with their father. Nénette offers neither explanation nor apology. All she does is point out how irrelevant Boni’s agitated point is since, in fact, she has now run away from their father. Indeed, Dénis’s focus on how, by turns, both kids focus on the present reveals the depth of their defense against their past. Dénis, an artist at work here, is employing form and style to disclose purpose and meaning rather than relying on a hack’s fatuous exposition where characters conveniently verbalize the scenarist’s understanding of them. Watch what Dénis does and you begin to catch the beauty of her film. Take the father’s considerably delayed introduction. What a blunder by all conventional rules of narrative exposition; but this long delay precisely expresses the degree to which Nénette and Boni wish to keep him out of their lives. When he finally storms into Boni’s apartment looking for Nénette, we are confronted with a monstrous intrusion. Boni, who carefully guards his (mother-fixated) life, of course reacts with hostility and contempt, just as he did at Nénette’s unexpected appearance. But more: the delay of the father’s appearance moves the intrusion into the realm of violation. We feel this. It isn’t just that the boy’s comfort and convenience have been dealt a blow, as when his sister popped up; it’s as if an act of God—a torrential wind or rain—had broken through a surface barricade.

One of the film’s sharpest ironies involves this father’s sudden death. He is the victim, it would appear, of an unexplained "hit" by business associates. What Dénis provides, rather than tidy explanation, is visual: a burst of blood. This now is what the man’s two offspring wanted; he is out of their lives—only, it is dramatic irony, because we know of his end while they don’t. But the violence of the image compounds this irony further; for it perfectly expresses what, despite his death, will be the man’s lingering impact on his children’s lives. His is a troubling, confounding legacy of violence, the sense of which would have come across only in a greatly reduced form if we had been told just why indeed the man was done away with.

Irony in this film begets irony; one is interwoven with another and another. The man’s legacy of violence for his children who do not even know of his death is compounded also by the fact that, a man with a dream of the future, he was planning on moving into a new, larger home where he hoped his son and daughter would join him. In death, he has been dispossessed of his dream; in life, his children may have thus been dispossessed of their last chance to come together as brother and sister.

Dénis`s film is a richly textured work whose fabric, though "tight" (no wasted shots here), breathes. Also, it is a joyous work, from the sheer beauty of much of its imagery, to Boni’s delightful fantasies involving (with a nod to Pagnol) the baker’s wife up the street (in which context their actual encounters provide, from them both, wonderful instances of comical anxiety), to Boni’s spirited boogie-ing in his cramped, narrow pizza van—a stunning visual metaphor of his irrepressible adaptability in a hard, limited environment. Nothing in this unsentimental film invites even to the smallest degree self-pity by proxy.

Dénis, this time, triumphs. In Agnès Godard, her color cinematographer, moreover, she has an ideal accomplice—someone as adept as she at negotiating a union between seamy, messy reality and exquisite beauty. And there are her two leads. Houri, gorgeous, is an unforgettable Nénette. Her face is at once timelessly lovely and teenage-ordinary, focused and confused, "settled" and "unsettled"—a mix of pluck and defeat, world-weariness and world-readiness. Here is a performance fit to break one’s heart. Following splendid work in Agnieszka Holland’s Olivier, Olivier (1992) and Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (1994), Colin as Boni is even better. His chiseled face, exotic, opaque eyes and spiderleg fingers Dénis and Godard find ideal for projecting a difficult boy "on the edge," one as much out of the world as in; and with deft sensitivity and rough, riveting presence he creates one of cinema’s most compelling portraits of troubled male adolescence — perhaps the finest since Jean-Pierre Léaud`s first crack at Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s hovering The 400 Blows (1959).