This Is the Rhythm of My Life: Failure in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail

“To fail in everything, it is true, will always remain possible.” –Derrida, Specters of Marx In Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), the eminence of doom is almost palpable; from the foregrounded terrain of war, to the protagonist Galoup’s (Denis Lavant) exclusion from the taut brotherhood of legionnaires and his reflections on mortality, it is a […]

Holy Motors: “I miss the cameras.”

After a thirteen-year hiatus, filmmaker Leos Carax returns with Holy Motors (2012), a kaleidoscopic dawn-to-dusk journey through Paris following the chameleon-like figure known only as Monsieur Oscar (frequent Carax collaborator, Denis Lavant). Oscar is an actor-for-hire, commissioned by a series of unknown clientele to perform as an array of characters, playing out vignettes on the […]