Most celebrated for “Beau Travail,” her sensuous transposition of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” to an African outpost of France’s Foreign Legion, Claire Denis could be the strongest French filmmaker of the post-New Wave generation. She is certainly the greatest risk-taker — unafraid to eroticize her male actors, unleash outré violence, or subsume an elusive narrative in a fiercely lyrical force field.
“No Fear, No Die,” made nearly a decade before “Beau Travail,” does all three. Newly restored, the film is now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, its first New York run since 1992. Few revivals are more deserving.
Introduced when Denis was still relatively unknown, as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Eurobeat: Blacks in European Cinema,” the movie was well received at the time. (Caryn James’s New York Times review in 1992 called it “exquisite in its own tough-minded way.”) Still, even as Denis’s stature has grown, her confident third feature has been largely overlooked.
“No Fear, No Die” might be described as doubly noir. Set in a sketchy demimonde, it takes its epigraph from the sometime crime writer Chester Himes’s memoir “My Life of Absurdity”: “Every human being, whatever his race, nationality, religion or politics, is capable of anything and everything.” The main characters are two former colonial subjects. Dah (Isaach de Bankolé, featured in several Denis films, including her first “Chocolat”) is from Benin; his partner Jocelyn (Alex Descas) from Martinique.
The action is largely confined to a glorified truck stop disco in a dingy Paris suburb. The club’s shady white owner Pierre (Jean-Claude Brialy) plans to use the joint as an arena for cockfights. The sport is illegal in France, if not Martinique, where Pierre formerly lived and, as he makes abundantly clear, enjoyed the favors of Jocelyn’s mother.
Dah, who narrates the film, cuts the deals and buys the roosters; Jocelyn, more tightly wound and self-possessed, grooms and trains them. As he lavishes his attention on the birds, so Denis lavishes hers on the process. Tension is palpable. “An uncaged hen gives the cocks bad vibes,” Jocelyn warns. Here, as in a James M. Cain novel, the uncaged hen is the boss’s provocative young wife, Toni (Solveig Dommartin, the statuesque trapeze artist in Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire”). She may be messing around with her sullen stepson, but Jocelyn nurses his own yen. Indeed, he names his prize white bird Toni.
Ripe with Oedipal intrigue, yet often oblique, the movie is an adult fairy tale given a sense of hard-boiled realism by its documentary elements. (One unforgettable detail: Losing roosters become coq au vin.) Brooding interactions are interspersed with frenzied feather-fluttering matches, offering a calibrated buildup to the convulsive finale — a high-stakes battle involving the human Toni as well as her avian namesake.
The end-credit disclaimer that no animals were harmed during production comes as a relief. Still, one may wonder how Denis staged these kinetic cock fights. The movie’s 1992 press book mentions beak-blockers, soft plastic spurs and the application of veterinarian-prescribed anesthetics. The secret sauce is the virtuoso filmmaking — the power of suggestion created by the cinematographer Agnès Godard’s telephoto close-ups and Denis’s editing.
No Fear, No Die
July 19-25 at BAM in Brooklyn; bam.org.
Read More: ‘No Fear, No Die’: Claire Denis’s Noir Comes Home to Roost
