“All human beings, of whatever race or nationality or religious belief or ideology, will do anything and everything.” An epigraph from Chester Himes sounds an appropriate note of pulp philosophy for this underworld allegory, a stark and gritty follow-up to the stately Chocolat. Dah (Isaach de Bankolé) and Jocelyn (Alex Descas) are black immigrants in France hired by a white nightclub owner, Ardennes (Jean-Claude Brialy), to train roosters for illegal cockfights. Cooped up with the characters in dingy subterranean spaces, the camera captures the rituals of tenderness and balletic aggression that make up the birds' conditioning, along with the equally edgy dance among Jocelyn, Ardennes, and Ardennes's beautiful wife (Solveig Dommartin, of Wings of Desire). Denis doesn't flinch in depicting brutality, toward either the cocks or their keepers. “Men, cocks: same thing,” says Dah; for both, life is a fight that can end only one way.
—Juliet Clark