Denis Offers a Taste of Her Own Past With ‘Chocolat’

Tomorrow is French director Claire Denis’ 41st birthday, but what really makes the day special for her is the fact that her first feature, “Chocolat,” arrives in Los Angeles and London.

Set in the late ‘50s, in the waning days of French colonial Africa, “Chocolat” (at the Nuart) focuses on a tender relationship between a pair of outsiders, the daughter (Cecile Ducasse) of a white French district officer and the family’s black servant (Isaach de Bankole). Through them, Denis reveals the colonial social structure to be as fragile as it is unjust.

Few fledgling directors have been so well-prepared to make their first film. Among the directors Denis has assisted since her graduation from the French film school IDHEC are Jacques Rivette, Costa-Gavras, Dusan Makavejev, Wim Wenders (on “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire”) and the recent American discovery, Jim Jarmusch (“Down by Law”).

Wenders is one of her film’s producers, and it was while on the vast desert locations for the 1984 film “Paris, Texas” that she was reminded of the vistas of her childhood in Cameroon.

Denis, a fragile-appearing blond woman who speaks soft, slightly accented English, said she is sure she’s been influenced by the directors she has assisted, but only on an unconscious level.

“You don’t really know what you’re made of,” she said during a recent interview in the lounge of the Chateau Marmont. “It was important to try to create a grammar for the story you want to tell. I was not looking for a style I could use on every film. I was interested in creating the feeling of a time that has gone--the feeling you are having a daydream. I was trying to create something with images seen from a certain distance.”

Denis said she was trying to avoid probing the psychology of her characters, going for a more laconic-feeling story.

“I’m not a cool person, I’m a very emotional person, but I like laconic stories because they can raise strong emotions in a different way,” she said. “I adore Dashiell Hammett. He just gives you the facts, yet there’s this passion, this incredible drama in his stories. What he does is to give you your choice of standing where you want. He lets you decide for yourself as to how you feel about his people. Jarmusch and Wenders do this, and that’s why I admire them.”

Although Denis moved from her native France to Africa when she was 2 months old, she said that “Chocolat” is not autobiographical. She prefers to describe it as a work of “the collective memory.”

“The relationship of the child and the houseboy was common to everyone. Everyone who has lived in Africa will recognize the story,” she said. “Colonialism created perverted relationships. I wanted to show that this kind of relationship between two cultures could create wounds and scars. Colonialism is one way to be blind; it is not normal.

“My brother, sister and parents were moved, I think, by the film. My father, who was a civil servant, was disappointed because I didn’t make a more historical film. He wanted to be part of the independence movement always. He felt it was his duty. In the film the father is a very nice man, but he would rather sit on the veranda and say, ‘The day will come when we won’t be here.’ One thing I did take from my own father was his driving recklessly on dirt roads.”

Denis’ family stayed in Cameroon for three years after its 1960 independence, and Denis’ father set up a radio station for the new government. However, Denis and her sister were sent back to France with their mother when they were stricken with polio in 1963. (Claire spent 1 1/2 years in a hospital but recovered fully; her sister was left with a slight limp.)

Since completing “Chocolat,” a title that refers to dark skin and the ‘50s French slang for “to be had,” Denis made a documentary on a Cameroon band during its first French tour. This summer, she will do a portrait of her mentor, New Wave pioneer Jacques Rivette, for French television.

Denis, who is writing what she hopes will be her next feature, said that directing her first film was sort of a mystical experience that gave her a new perspective on film making.

“One day you’re dreaming about a film, and then you find yourself in the middle of Africa with all these people there because they believe in your film,” she said. “It makes you feel very humble and strong.”