‘No Fear, No Die’ Review: A Poetic Look at the Legacy of French-African Colonialism

In a 1990 issue of Essence, Isaach De Bankolé was heralded as “France’s new leading man,” largely due to his appearance in Jacques W. Benoit’s How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, a French-language Canadian comedy released in 1989 about, per the magazine, “a struggling novelist who is irresistibly appealing to white women.” Even if intended as satire, that film’s provocative title provides a stark counterpoint to the far weightier and serious concerns of Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die, in which De Bankolé plays Dah, a French immigrant from Benin toiling on the outskirts of Paris trying to make ends meet.

In Denis’s poetic and clear-eyed sophomore feature, De Bankolé inhabits a character whose default expression speaks to his disaffection, caught as he is in a web of exploitation that thrusts him into the world of illegal cockfights held in the basement of a small restaurant. As with Denis’s previous Chocolat, in which De Bankolé plays a “houseboy” in 1950s French Cameroon, emphasis is placed both on how the French legacy of colonialism persists into the present, as well as how Black men are often filtered through the white imagination to ruinous ends.

Inspired loosely on the writings of Frantz Fanon—who famously analyzed the difference between seeing a Tarzan film in the Antilles versus Europe as a Black man in the 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks—No Fear, No Die constructs a minimalist scenario in which Dah and Jocelyn (Alex Descas), who’s from the French Antilles, are business partners with Pierre (Jean-Claude Brialy), a shady restaurateur and the ringleader of the cockfights. Rather than construct a procedural that details the ins and outs of organizing fights and training roosters for cruel bloodsport, the film spends much of its time showing Dah and Jocelyn in their dingy quarters, with them having little to do besides listen to music and tend to the stable of birds.

The film’s title comes, in part, from the name Jocelyn gives his favorite rooster, which he treats with tenderness and affection. It’s clear in early sequences that Denis is drawing a parallel between the two men and the animals. Both Dah and Jocelyn are, to borrow from a poem by Maya Angelou, caged birds whose wings are clipped and feet are tied. Only in Denis’s film, opening their throats to sing isn’t an option, as they have no voice in this society.

When Pierre makes reference to Jocelyn’s mother, who he knew while spending time in the French Antilles years prior, the man maliciously suggests that he could be Jocelyn’s father, which speaks to the Frenchman’s attempted psycho-sexual hold over immigrant men. Pierre, who views both Dah and Jocelyn as beneath him, doesn’t merely angle for financial control of them; he also wields France’s history of exploitation to gain power for himself in the present.

Complicating these aims is Toni (Solveig Dommartin), Pierre’s wife, who views Dah and Jocelyn with kinder, albeit still exoticizing, eyes. When the restaurant basement isn’t being used for cockfights, it’s transformed into a nightclub that plays pulsating electronic music, and it’s there that Toni and a girl share a beautifully intimate dance. And yet, even in this scene, Jocelyn is unable to speak his desires for this woman, as we understand him to be emotionally bottled as a result of being Pierre’s business partner. It becomes increasingly evident that it’s just a matter of time before Jocelyn’s interior angst will explode into some sort of exterior action.

In effect, Dah becomes the primary onlooker as Jocelyn—consumed by his growing obsession with Toni, his helplessness to Pierre’s power, and his rage at participating in the torture and destruction of numerous beloved roosters—slips into alcoholism and makes a decisive move. But in Denis’s downtrodden milieu, neither Dah nor Jocelyn are able to extricate themselves from psychological torment because the structures of abuse remain fully intact.