5 - Dressed to Kill: Opacity and Masquerade in Claire Denis's J'ai Pas Sommeil

Summary

The previous chapter explored the ways in which spectators in and beyond the francophone Caribbean are influenced by their experience of viewing the ‘boulevard’ Caribbean comedy Ma commère Alfred. In contrast, this final chapter takes an art-house film by acclaimed French director Claire Denis and proposes a theoretical and historically informed study of its style, narrative and reception. Denis's 1994 film J’ai pas sommeil is loosely built around the events of the controversial ‘Paulin affair’, arguably the most famous French fait divers of the mid-1980s. Thierry Paulin, dubbed the ‘monstre de Montmartre’ in the French press, was a homosexual man from Martinique who, along with his Guyanese lover, Jean-Thierry Mathurin, was arrested and charged with the murder of twenty-one elderly women in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. Paulin, who was HIV-positive, died from the virus in prison before the conclusion of the trial. In the film, Paulin inspires the character of Camille (Richard Courcet), a transvestite cabaret performer from Martinique who, with his white lover and accomplice, robs and murders old women. However, J’ai pas sommeil does not seek to explain the psychological compulsion behind such crimes, nor does it directly attribute the motive for the murders to Camille's marginal position as a homosexual man of colour. In fact, the murder plot is not the film's central focus, but rather is incorporated as one of many connecting strands in a web of ambivalent marginalised identities, which expose the tensions surrounding race and security which the Paulin affair brought to light in an era of rising cultural paranoia in France.

In this chapter, I will first examine the paradoxical diasporic status of Martinicans living in France, emphasised in the film by the intermittent visibility of Camille and his family. By contextualising my argument within France's colonial policy of assimilation, this chapter explores the opaque forms of cultural resistance to the transparency of France’s ‘civilising’ project, made manifest in Denis's film. In my analysis of J’ai pas sommeil, I focus on strategies of formal and thematic masquerade, narrative ‘screening’ and unveiling, and how ‘performative’ identification within the film itself affects the visibility of the minoritised protagonists.