Nonetheless, it is striking to consider that a number of current, otherwise disparate narrative films directed by women operate according to their own stubbornly private rules, logic, timing, and spatial organization . . . Where a [Terrence] Malick, for instance, builds a master narrative and theme and then fills it with poetic and intuitive connections and flights, such abstractions form both the actual connective tissue as well as the substance of [The Intruder], Denis’s brooding meditation on spiritual displacement.

Ben Sachs: I know this will sound reductive, but I’d say the women I know tend to be more intuitive than men. They’ll often “feel” their way through a problem before tackling it in a step-by-step manner. I thought about this while rewatching White Material. The movie, like many by Denis, asks you to intuit the characters’ relationships from impressions of environment and physical behavior. For instance, it’s not until about one-third into the movie that we realize that Huppert’s and Christopher Lambert’s characters are divorced. We’re inclined to assume they’re married because they live on the plantation together and share so many possessions.

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One of my favorite images of the movie is the shot where Huppert moves her hand through this basket of recently harvested coffee beans and finds this bloody goat’s head. It seems to sum up the movie’s narrative structure—just keep shifting details around and sooner or later you’ll find this shocking revelation. Of course, it also reminds us how the violence underlying this social order was never far from the surface.

  • Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert in White Material

She’s trying to represent what she experienced as a little girl.

I think one of the central insights of Chocolat is that European women may have recognized the cruelty of colonialism before men did because they weren’t active participants in it. The white women in the film are kept on the sidelines—they have all this time to observe how everything works. I thought of Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9, which connects a critique of colonialism to a feminist critique of patriarchy.

The moments she picks to showcase—I’m thinking of the three airport workers in the final shot of Chocolat—they’re not always serious.

  • Chocolat

  • Muriel