NO FEAR, NO DIE (S’en Fout la Mort) A-
France Germany (90 mi)
1990 d: Claire Denis
It’s a film that’s
influenced by Frantz Fanon’s Peaux noire, masques blancs (Black Skins, White
Masks). I understood something in Fanon’s book that touched me immensely. I am
a very sensitive person who can’t stand the feeling of humiliation, regardless
if black or whites are the objects of this humiliation. When I read Les Damnés
de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), it increased my anger over the social
inequities that groups and individuals are forced to endure […]. In S’en fout
la mort, I deal with a French West Indian man here in Paris, exploring his
psychological weakness and the spiritual tragedy of his life. Fanon describes a
special type of neurosis – colonized people feeling psychologically defeated
even though they are physically free to determine their future.
—Claire Denis in an interview taking place August 21, 1994 with
Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, Claire
Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut
A powerful and brutally disturbing film, easily the most
dramatically downbeat of all the Denis films, and the most racially charged work
in her entire repertoire. Not an easy
film to digest, with metaphoric implications, it is nonetheless a work of
extraordinary power, but one that keeps its seething undertones beneath the
surface. Coming early in her career,
after having made the highly acclaimed Chocolat
(1988), which is more of a classically structured, visually impressive
European art film, this simply isn’t like that, at times feeling
infurioratingly subliminal. While both
films deal with the effects of colonization, Chocolat
(1988) examines symptoms of a colonized occupation, while NO FEAR, NO DIE
focuses more upon the psychological impact left behind, where the postcolonial
mindset still has traumatic reverberations from having been imprinted by a
colonized mentality. These are highly
complex ideas that rarely ever translate well to the screen, where even Richard
Wright’s Native
Son (1951), starring the author as the lead character, comes across as less
incendiary than the novel upon which it is based. While Beau
Travail (1999) receives heaps of praise, deservedly so, but especially from
white critics, who may be less inclined to endorse a complicated and downbeat
work about two black immigrants from former French colonies, where racist
attitudes are prevalent throughout, making it intentionally uncomfortable and
difficult to watch. A work that was
clearly inspired by Frantz Fanon, its grim racial implications are so subtly
presented that some may miss it altogether, as Denis leaves plenty to the
imagination, and there are no explanatory references communicated to the
audience, as this is a film, much like psychological neuroses, that largely
exists under the surface.
Isaach de Bankolé, who played Protée in Chocolat
(1988) is Dah, an African from Benin, while Alex Descas is Jocelyn from the
West Indies, where the two are business partners smuggling roosters into France
for illegal cockfights. Their
destination is an industrial factory district that is little more than a truck
stop, a strange and mysterious landscape in the banlieues outside Paris where
an abandoned warehouse has been refurbished inside for cockfights. While Dah offers a sparse inner narration,
Jocelyn provides the training for the animals, having grown up with them as a
child on the islands, and Dah handles the business end with white club owner Pierre
Ardennes, Jean-Claude Brialy from early New Wave films, whose sensuous wife
Toni, Solveig Dommartin from Wim Wenders WINGS OF DESIRE (1987) and UNTIL THE
END OF THE WORLD (1991), runs the bar, while the brooding son Michel
(Christopher Buchholz) handles the disco.
Dah is the more jovial and outgoing of the two and seems unaffected by
the callousness of his white business associates, while Jocelyn is silent for
much of the film, whose growing resentment only escalates, where his troubling
relationship with the whites slowly deteriorates, becoming the centerpiece of
the film. Both black actors are superb,
perhaps offering the performances of their respective careers, but they do so
nonverbally, as so much of the film is expressed through their silent reaction
to what’s taking place around them, an often brutal and suffocating world that
if they’re not careful would swallow them whole. What’s immediately apparent is the difference
in living quarters, as the whites live upstairs in relative opulence, with
their own private chef, used to the finer things in life where wine and
champagne are the norm, while the two blacks live downstairs in the boiler room
in the same cramped space as the caged roosters. One can only imagine the smell.
The film opens with a quote from black American writer Chester
Himes, who emigrated to France in the 1950’s, a contemporary of fellow
expatriate black writers Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and James Baldwin: “All men, whatever their race, color or
origins, are capable of anything and everything.” Denis finds a way of visualizing this
expression through the underworld of illegal cockfighting, a savage ritual that
exists in order to please the men who bet heavily on the outcome. The intensity of the men screaming on the
sidelines with wads of cash in their hands matches the flurry of blurred
movement in the pit where the two roosters continually jump around and peck at
one another. This violent portrait of
exploitation overlaps with the private worlds of the men who run the
operation. No one identifies with the
animals more than Jocelyn, who feeds and trains them, while also nursing them
back to health after a fight, often seen dancing with them in the training ring
while listening to blaring rap music.
This draws the attention of Toni, who makes unannounced visits into
their lower domain, where the underlying sexual vibe suggests these are the men
she’s really interested in, as they name their most prized rooster after her, where
the extreme physicality of their world is beautifully captured by the
director’s approach to making such uniquely sensual films. It’s in scenes like this where the audience
realizes these men have no privacy, where the lowered ceilings offer a claustrophobic
environment that couldn’t feel more oppressively suffocating and confined,
little more than an underground prison. Jocelyn’s
attachment to the animals becomes problematic, as he identifies only with the
lower life forms, seething with resentment at the brazenly offensive manner of Ardenne,
whose arrogance compels him to freely discuss how he had an affair with
Jocelyn’s mother, describing how he has her eyes, where one sees hatred brewing
in the eyes of his own son Michel, not to mention Toni, where men crudely brag
about their sexual exploits.
A word about Michel, as this character figures prominently
in Denis films, perhaps best represented by Nicolas Duvauchelle in White
Material (2010), the son of the white owner of a coffee plantation in
Africa, where he inherits privilege, growing up expecting he can have anything
he wants, and that he is entitled to it.
His self-centered views, never having to think of anyone else except
himself, are in stark contrast to people of color, who always have to make
adjustments for white people and grow up wary of people like him, as they are
capable of doing just about anything, and getting away with it. In this film, Michel has little screen time,
yet he has a powerful influence, as he’s accidentally interrupted by Dah and
Jocelyn who arrive in the basement while he’s having sex with Toni, his father’s
wife, who stares directly at Jocelyn, which elevates the moral void to tragic Shakespearean
proportions, as the Ardennes have no boundaries or shame. When viewed in this context, nothing is more
dangerous than slighted masculinity, where in the eyes of blacks, there is no
greater threat than white male violence, which is so unpredictable, supposedly
your friend one moment, but viciously attacking you the next, where that
violence may erupt at any time. Denis’s
film pulsates with that untapped rage, ready to go off at any moment, where her
film is a choreography of untapped masculinity, sexual desire, violence, and
unforeseen danger, where the clash of these forces is like electrically charged
objects continually bumping into one another, where it’s only a matter of time
before there’s an explosion, heightened by the co-mingling forces of hostility,
as represented by the oppressed and the oppressor, the colonized and the
colonizer, where every scene deals with one protruding into the other.
Relentlessly bleak and uncompromisingly honest, the film
offers a parallel into the dangerous and inhumane living conditions of many
black male immigrants living in France.
When viewed under the lens of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the colonized are forced to live in
disgustingly cramped conditions resembling slave quarters, often made to feel
like animals, which has a way of affecting their psychological outlook, as they
are drawn to failure, feeling defeated before they begin, where the transience
and impermanency of their lives diminishes their human value and self-worth, resembling
the cheap, exploitive goods that are a staple of colonial trade and commerce. Ultimately humiliated and ashamed, especially
when looked upon by an attractive white woman, where they are powerless to
reciprocate, as it was the kiss of death during the slavery era, the colonized
black man’s view of himself is extremely pessimistic, as his dignity has been
destroyed, where he’s inclined to have a death wish to simply put an end to his
misery. Alongside this dour mindset,
Denis stages a series of high stakes cockfights, where Ardenne, being the vile
and contemptible man that he is, ups the ante, making the fights even more
brutal, believing he can make more money if they tie razors to the rooster’s feet,
which means instant death, as roosters are suddenly carried out in plastic
bags. For Jocelyn, who trains these
animals like they were his own, this is the ultimate indignity and
disgrace. While he wanted to leave
earlier, as he sensed Ardenne’s manic energy was uncontainable, Dah tracks him
down and brings him back, where he’s forced to endure this slaughter of the
only creatures that hold any meaning in his life, all in the name of greed and
money, so reminiscent of the amusement of men obtained by pitting gladiators
against one another in the spectacle that was the Roman Colosseum. Slowly, through strangely unbalanced images,
like a scene of Jocelyn dancing with a white girl, continually holding her too
close, Jocelyn is seen losing his equilibrium, where his ultimate breakdown is
heartbreaking, as is Dah’s comforting response afterwards, where the simplicity
of childhood memories even under colonization reflect a time of happiness and
innocence that had not yet been lost. Once
more, though sparingly used, the raw and soulful music of Abdullah Ibrahim
offers a perfect compliment.
Great!
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