Nenette and Boni

Director: Claire Denis

1996 / 103min / 35mm

Alice Houri and Grégoire Colin, playing an estranged sister and brother reunited after leaving the same broken home behind, are the title characters of Denis’s domestic drama, a film whose emotional generosity is perfectly matched by the luminous warmth of its images. Nénette, 15 and pregnant, shows up on the doorstep of her brother, a terminally horny 19-year-old line cook at a Marseilles pizzeria, and after initial misgivings, the siblings clumsily try their hand at forming a family. Denis’s first collaboration with the Nottingham group Tindersticks, who would go on to join Jean-Louis Ughetto in the director’s repertory ensemble of professional associates, both parties contributing inestimably to the film’s marvelous, buoyant musicality—as does Brian Wilson, as the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” gets an indelible needle drop.

Distributor: Strand

Part of Jean-Louis Ughetto: The Sound of Things