You sense it not just in the father (Alex Descas), but in the people around him, especially the friend who ends up committing suicide. There’s a lot of tension between the characters. Sometimes that tension is explained, other times it’s left alone, as in the relationship between the father and daughter and their neighbors. It’s very enigmatic, that sense of something in the past that continues to trap the characters.

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Saeed-Vafa: It sounds like it was a normal part of life there, but in France, Jocelyn’s hired to do it underground. I think the film even makes a reference to [philosopher] Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks [1967], which discusses humiliation and destruction in colonial society. You know, Brialy talks about the “good old days” in Martinique, but we see that French society hasn’t changed since then. Now there’s a new colonization going on—men [from the former colonies] come to France for work, and that’s all they get. There’s a sense of contained violence in the film, which is really powerful because of the anger underneath it.

Both of these films generate a certain amount of tension by focusing on definitely defined communities. In No Fear, that community’s defined by the club that Brialy owns—most of the film takes place in, around, or underneath it. And yet within those parameters, there’s all this movement, violence, handheld camerawork.

  • No Fear, No Die

Jonathan Rosenbaum: The film it reminded me of most was The Hustler, which is also very claustrophobic. That’s about exploitation too—Cockfighter isn’t about that, really.

Saeed-Vafa: I really like the beginning of the film. You see all these shots from the windows of trains, but it takes a while before you realize that Descas works as a train conductor and we’re seeing through his point of view. The location shots feel very impersonal—they hint at a loneliness before we know whose loneliness it is.

  • 35 Shots of Rum

With Denis, scenes are interrelated so that what happens with one character influences the tone of what we see in the next scene with totally different characters. So, for example, when we see [Descas’s] friend who’s forced to retire and he’s so sad—that sadness overshadows other scenes without necessarily changing the point of view.

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