Claire Denis’s Capitalist Bastards

Abstract

The films of Claire Denis consistently make global systems visible, and do so in ways that are seductively sensory. This article analyses Denis’s film Les Salauds as a queasily affective staging of contemporary capitalism’s gendered hostility. It draws both on politically engaged theories of contemporary cinema and on the insights of affect theory to understand the film’s close imbrication of financial control and sexual exploitation. Les Salauds is almost entirely set in Paris, but it refers outward to Denis’s earlier films of transnational circulation, using Michel Subor’s performance as a monstrous exploiter as a point of commonality. The article analyses the figure of the ‘salaud’ in French culture, reading Subor’s character Laporte through Sartre. It goes on to examine how the class qualities of the salaud seep beyond character and out across the film text. What emerges is a threatening mise-en-scène that evokes the hostile condition of contemporary capitalism in its articulation of time, space and affect. Gender becomes the focus for this hostility, where economic relations are played out across the body of Justine, the sexually tortured daughter. The article asks what kinds of resistance are imaginable in this oppressive milieu.