Nenette and Boni

A French film set in Marseille. Boni is twenty. He sells pizza from a van, hangs about with his friends, and lives alone in the house left by his mother. He daydreams all day. He is obsessed with the baker's wife in the neighbourhood and writes about her in a notebook. One day his sister comes to the door. Nénette is fifteen, has run from her boarding school, and is pregnant. Boni does not want her. They have not spoken for years and she will not say why she ran. Nénette stays. From there the film describes the time the two spend in the same house. A kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and things not spoken. Nénette does not want the child. The birth is approaching and she makes no preparation. Boni does the opposite. He gets a room ready, buys things, and starts taking the baby on as his own. Their father appears. Both are on bad terms with him and his arrival makes things tighter. What the narrative is interested in is not pregnancy but touch: neither sibling knows how to reach the other, and the film builds that through movement rather than speech. The narrative explains very little. Why she ran, what happened to their mother, and the matter with their father are never told. The form is sensory. Kneading dough, coffee, bread, water and skin are constantly in close-up; the film gives its information through image and texture. The music is by Tindersticks, and the director's long working relationship with the band began with this film. The film won the main prize at Locarno. Grégoire Colin, Alice Houri, Vincent Gallo and Jacques Nolot are in the cast. Claire Denis directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes sensory European cinema that says little. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to follow a story; the narrative is deliberately incomplete and the ending is abrupt.