The patron saint of outsiders, French director Claire Denis, doesn't fear to tread on the dark side. "Nenette et Boni" (1996), an unsentimental portrait of a perverse relationship between a brother and sister toughing out their adolescence in working-class Marseilles, is bathed in emotional brutality. In one of her greatest films, "Beau Travail" (1999), a masterpiece loosely based on Herman Melville's allegorical novel "Billy Budd," she delves into the coded, insular world inhabited by a unit of French Legionnaires posted in Djibouti, East Africa. The central character, Galoup (Denis Lavant), epitomizes the perfect Legionnaire until the arrival of Sentain (Gregoire Colin), an innocent young soldier. Jealous, fearful and suppressing forbidden erotic desire, Galoup charts a course that seals Sentain's destruction as well as his own. Austere, visually poetic with spare dialogue and superb cinematography by the director's frequent collaborator Agnes Godard, "Beau Travail" is an abstraction. Instead of the malignancy that propelled Melville's tale, Denis opts for moral ambiguity, the sheltering sky, stark desert landscapes and the merciless African sun mitigated only by an azure sea.
For its fifth season, Modern Cinema will screen "Claire Denis: Seeing is Believing" for three rewarding weekends this month. The series, a collaborative venture between SFMOMA and SFFILM, includes the aforementioned films and 10 others by the veteran auteur, along with movies that have either influenced her filmmaking sensibility or that she worked on early in her career, such as Wim Wenders' magical, Fellini-esque "Wings of Desire," a production where she first met Godard, and "Down by Law," directed by Jim Jarmusch, who hired the young Denis as an assistant. "From the start, we understood each other without words," she has said of Jarmusch, with whom she shares a long-term affinity for society's misfits.
Denis is well-acquainted with the sensation of being a stranger in strange land. Though she has resided in Paris for decades, she spent her childhood in Cameroon, West Africa in the 1950s, where her father, a French colonial administrator, was posted. Her experiences as a foreign interloper stuck and have remained with her, infiltrating her work from the beginning. They made their way into her intimate, beautifully composed debut, "Chocolat" (1988), a gentle, troubling reverie revealed through a white woman's coming-of-age memories, and the family's black African houseservant, whom she befriended as a young girl.
With the taut, unforgettable 2009 film "White Material," Denis returned to Africa, but not to the place she knew as a child or to the comparatively idyllic world of "Chocolat." The unnamed country in which the later story transpires is a ruined paradise overtaken by poverty and near-mythic violence; human savagery has been unleashed, and the unspeakable is primed to happen and does. In her strongest work since "Beau Travail," Denis created the threat of imminent danger through stillness rather than action. She was helped immeasurably by an astringent, fully committed performance from her leading lady, a gaunt, impossibly resolute Isabelle Huppert, who is as hard and unforgiving as the patch of land on which her character has staked her claim and hacked out an existence.
Settling in a territory torn apart by civil war and dead-eyed, machete-wielding, child soldiers, Martha, the French ex-pat played by Huppert, insists on operating a crippled coffee plantation with a tenacity bordering on madness. Her denial of reality allows her to hang on even when hope is gone and all signs point to the exits.
Denis has something to say here about power, those who have it, and those who would take it away or back. Wild animals tentatively emerging from the woods seem civilized compared to the humans rampaging through the countryside, and scenes of the waif-like Martha wandering on dusty clay roads in her pastel shifts heighten the impression of a creature no longer at the top of the food chain.
Denis took a headlong plunge into corrosive urban alienation, violence and displacement with "I Can't Sleep" (1994), inspired by the sensational true-crime saga of the "granny killers." The notorious pair, Thierry Paulin, a gay, black, HIV-positive, drug dealer and drag performer, and Jean-Thierry Mathurin, his lover and accomplice, went on a killing spree in the late 1980s, robbing and murdering 20 elderly Parisian women, but Denis remains almost clinically detached, reserving judgment on immigrant characters caught in the maelstrom of crime.
Her most recent outing, "Let the Sunshine In," takes an uncharacteristic turn from her usual harsh terrain toward comedy - yes, comedy, albeit a wry and sober one, with sanguine insight into the folly of sex and romance in middle age. It stars the dependably luminous Juliette Binoche, an actress expert at projecting fragility and steeliness in the same breath, as Isabelle, an unconventional divorced woman in her 50s trying to figure out what she wants. Working her way through a succession of incompatible, boorishly insensitive, mostly unavailable men who treat her with varying degrees of disregard, she attempts to fathom the mystery of lasting love that has so far eluded her. Watch out for a devilish Gerard Depardieu, who pops up briefly in fine rotund form, and an artful if ironic placement of Etta James' signature, "At Last," a triumphant, bittersweet anthem Isabelle may never have the chance to claim for her own. Could it be that Denis, now 71, is softening with age? Not bloody likely.