Today's director for Female Filmmakers is a heavy-hitter. She is an international powerhouse who has made a big impact from her home in France. We are talking about the marvelous maven Claire Denis.
Claire Denis was born in Paris, but she actually grew up all over West Africa where her father worked for the government. Growing up in colonial Africa with a father who taught her that freedom from France would be best for all of these nations wound up really influencing Claire. A lot of her work deals with colonialism. When she was 12, she got polio and the family moved back to the suburbs of Paris so that she could get treatment.
This made her feel like an outsider and a constant observer. She began her career as a photographer's assistant and started to get used to life observing the world behind a camera. Finally, she made her debut film Chocolat in 1988. It is not the same as the very famous Chocolat that came years later. This movie was more autobiographical and dealt with life in colonial Africa.
This film was an instant critical success. She followed that up with several more films set in Africa before venturing into some truly French narratives.. Her 1999 film Beau Travail is considered one of the best French films of the 90s, but I'm inclined to think her best work was in the 2000s when Denis had her style down and she began to introduce more nudity into her films. Her 2001 film Trouble Every Day made no trouble for lovers of skin.
In this film, an American couple goes to Paris for a vacation. Well, it was supposed to be a vacation, but the husband in the pair has ulterior motives. He is a doctor and wanted to track down a French neuroscientist's wife played by Beatrice Dalle whom he was once obsessed with. Obsession, secrets, murder, and sex are the name of the game in this bloody thriller.
Vincent Gallo stars as the American doctor and Tricia Vessey plays his wife. She shows off her bush and breasts when she wades in a milky bathtub while Florence Loiret enjoys some nude scenes for herself - we enjoy them, too!
Her follow-up film was the 2013 thriller Bastards which debuted at Cannes that year. It was another critical success for Denis and the plot was a complicated one about an oil tanker captain who is asked to come back home after his estranged sister's husband kills himself. He gives up his job to be there for his sister and deals with some family affairs which wind up being much more to handle than our leading guy initially thought.
This film winds up having a lot of sex! His niece is a teen who is involved with a wealthy businessman who uses her for sex and hosts a series of sex parties on an old farm.
Chiara Mastroianni plays the businessman's wife Raphaelle and she has one very hot nude that really bares all. Well, she has a few nude scenes, but this one is my favorite:
Let the Sunshine In starred Juliette Binoche in a romantic drama based on a 1970s French novel called A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. That should give you an idea of how romantic this film about a middle-aged divorcee looking for love is.
Juliette plays the woman at the center of it all, a free-spirited woman looking for love who keeps falling for men who happen to be married. This woman is truly unlucky in love and just when she thinks she found what she is looking for, she sees a psychic who tells her to keep looking. Hey, did that psychic say anything about nudity?
High Life was Claire Denis' English language debut with an all-star cast and a trippy science fiction plot. In this film, a father and daughter survive in deep space alone and in total isolation as part of an experiment on human reproduction in space. A cosmic storm hits the ship and things get really weird for everyone on board...but they also get pretty damn sexy.
Mia Goth's milky titties start lactating at one point in the film! This looks like another white substance to me and it is very suggestive.
And who could forget Juliette Binoche going for a ride on a masturbation machine? It appears that Juliette might be one of Claire's muses because she has used her multiple times and in very sexy ways.
As a filmmaker, Claire Denis is praised for being so easy to work with. A lot of that has to do with how collaborative she is. It sounds like Claire Denis can do no wrong. When it comes to nude scenes, her work just keeps getting better and better. How very French of her!
