The Intruder

Claire Denis' The Intruder takes the director's sensual minimalism to its extremity, carving an entire film out of her tactile, elliptical direction at the expense of plot. Based on philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's autobiographical, post-structuralist essay of the same name, L'Intrus for the most part lacks even the recurring symbols that anchor her other features. The only constants are characters, about whom we learn nearly nothing.

What's impressive about Denis' staging is that L'Intrus still feels remarkably light-footed for its lack of clear-cut narrative. Denis' primary strength as a filmmaker is her ability to frame the human body in inventive and evocative manners, and she filters Nancy's philosophical text through an emotional lens, balancing an intellectualism that matches up with some of her own recurring themes with her most delicate, tantalizing imagery. The result is nothing less than a masterpiece.


L'Intrus opens with a Russian woman offering a précis of the film, solemnly whispering, "Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadow, in your heart" before moving to an unconnected image of a country road, the tranquility of which is interrupted by warning signs and a guard post. We see a customs official search a vehicle traveling from France into Switzerland, beginning the dialectical juxtaposition that defines much of the film's editing. Denis follows the border guard home to her husband and two young children. The husband gently seduces his wife with a story about them making love in the forest before plopping her down on his "branch." Then, Denis abruptly cuts to the forest outside as an old man bathes in a waterfall with his dogs nearby. Idyllic, panoramic views of the man, Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), contrast with shaky, hand-held POV shots of some scarcely seen stalker, particularly when Louis floats in a lake (Denis loves to shoot people floating in water; it makes people so serene, yet so vulnerable).

Then, the old man does some strokes in the lake, and something at last happens. Clearly, he has a heart attack while swimming, only just making it ashore to ride out the pain. A bit later, he heads to an abandoned shack in the same secluded area as his own tucked-away cabin and leaves a message in Russian that he needs the emergency procedure. There's a hint of playfulness to this skullduggery, Denis' way of misdirecting the audience to make something that should, frankly, be fascinating -- the heart transplant Louis requests from this sinister black market -- cinematically palatable before burying the thriller aspects in indecipherable opacity. The Intruder may not have a narrative, but the director will at least be kind enough to tease us with one.

But her main focus, as with the source essay, are the philosophical implications of receiving a heart transplant. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, man himself can now become a metaphorical Ship of Theseus, an object whose parts are replaced until one questions whether it remains the original subject. Louis not only requests a heart from the shadowy organization tailing him but a young heart, ensuring that he inherits the flesh of someone totally different than him (ultimately, he receives a young woman's heart, further emphasizing the split). The Ship of Theseus quandary forces one to ask whether an object whose parts have been systematically replaced can still be thought of as the original source. In these cases, we must not only ask whether Louis is the same person but whether he even is a human being anymore.

Ergo, the heart becomes an intruder in Louis' body, though if it does corrupt and alter Louis, it's doubtful anyone would mind the change. Though we receive marginally more clues about his past than any of the side characters who flutter about as if the cast of a fever dream, Louis tacitly reveals a dark past, possibly as a murderer. Occasionally, the camera moves not into moments of fantasy but subjective perception, showing Louis suddenly stabbing his pharmacist lover, only for the next shot to show her breathing in bed next to him. That disturbing side exacerbates the feelings of disconnect he emits when he travels abroad, first to Korea for the surgery, then to Tahiti to track down a long-lost son (thus intruding on his child's life).

The changed locales bring out the flip side of intrusion and secrecy: intense loneliness. Louis' harsh intensity makes him a fit for his secluded cabin in the wilderness, but the urban bustle and politeness of South Korea makes him look like a freak. Even the businessmen who meet with him are convivial and ingratiating. The cool blue that hung over the first act gives way to a neon glow that washes out Louis' menace. When he leaves for Tahiti, Denis gets away with infusing the film with one of her biggest themes, post-colonialism. Korea, never a Western colony but once under Japanese rule, looks more sophisticated and wealthy than the backwoods of France from whence Louis came. Tahiti is poorer, to be sure, but the bustle is electric. Tahiti's incandescent waters prove even more of a bad fit for Louis than Korea.

Still, for all of Louis' isolation, there exists possibilities for communication that would not have been possible in the colonial days. The old man meets a Korean as an equal in a restaurant when the kind Korean man briefly bonds with the protagonist over an Elvis song. The secret organization's ability to move back and forth at will across the landscapes reveals how easily one can now travel the world, a convenience that exacerbates feelings of loneliness by rapidly thrusting people into alien environments but also opening the possibility of connection. Louis might simply be too old to readjust.

Like memories, L'Intrus can capture minute, trivial minutiae in exacting detail but also leave massive, glaring omissions in linearity. The poetic realism allows for straightforward shots that morph into abstractions without warning or transition. The Russian woman who intoned the opening lines heads the team of covert operatives who trail Louis interacts with him and appears to be instrumental in securing the old man's new heart, yet she takes on an otherworldly quality. She hangs over Louis like death, or maybe his conscience, finally come home to torment its master. Though she has dialogue and direct contact with other characters, she reminded me of the silent young man outside the apartment complex in Kieslowski's The Decalogue, the spectral observer who looks upon the other characters with grave judgment. Denis' camera can form unconventional yet suggestive pairings, mixing the freckles on the pharmacist's face with the liver spots on Louis' back as the two make love or turning money into both the common denominator among the various locations and also the object that most separates people.* Her camera never sits still, and when it does slow down, it's only to capture the intense inner movement and turmoil behind the characters' eyes.

Even the more natural and real moments of the film have their stretched dimensions. Louis heads to Tahiti to find the son he never knew, but the man wants nothing to do with him. It's possible that the son isn't actually in Tahiti, and even that Louis doesn't have a son at all. Maybe this Tahitian lovechild is just Louis' way of not taking care of the estranged son who definitely exists (the husband of the border guard back in France) A friend from Trebor's past then holds auditions among local men to play the part of Louis' son. The people who come and stand before a panel cannot be actors: they're too shy, too confused by the whole thing, to be extras mugging for their five seconds. But the nature of their auditions is so odd that it turns this bit of documentary into one of the most ephemeral and abstract moments of the whole film.

Furthermore, the use of film history reveals the director's ability to place the questions her film raises within a larger context of cinematic metaphysics. Denis never uses film quotation out of the enthusiasm that marks, say, De Palma or Scorsese's reverence, but she has the same ability to reshape meaning from canon films. A shot of the Russians back around Louis' empty shack hunting vaguely recalls The Rules of the Game, while Denis uses clips from an unfinished film by Paul Gégauff, 1965's Le Reflux, to provide flashback material for Louis' time in Tahiti as a younger man (the clips feature a young Subor). This trick, reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's flashback tactic in The Limey, recognizes Subor as a distinct entity from his character, suggesting that the actor intrudes upon the character's life and that the complicated pasts of everyone involved should be considered. By admitting that someone else occupies the character, Denis can deepen her questions of the nature of the soul and the sense of profound loneliness that pervades the film. Louis already exists as a heartless man, someone whose immoral past corrupts him until he finally gets a functioning heart, which softens him for a time until his body at last rejects the organ. The split between Subor and Trebor compounds the unalterable course of this hollow man: he has no soul, and if someone else does not possess him, he's even more directionless.

The film, particularly its last, tropics-set act, owes a debt to the work of Paul Gauguin, and L'Intrus unfolds as a post-impressionist, principally synthetist, work. It is a film of lines and colors but no shape until it all the elements come together. Thus, The Intruder always feels as if it's still being assembled to the end, underlined by a minimalist score from frequent collaborator Stuart Staples of Tindersticks that also feels as if it's still in the writing phase. Denis is honest about this construction, revealing her aims in the manner in which she displays the title: she has a flashlight dart wildly over a black screen, revealing portions of the letters that make up the title until the red letters finally glow in full. Then, for a brief moment, she returns to the initial method of showing the word, suggesting that even when we get the full picture, we must still suss out some aspects of the film's makeup. It might explain why the film ends not on the somber, unseen and unremarked finale of Louis' life but on a shot of his neighbor (Béatrice Dalle), a young dog trainer he unsuccessfully attempted to seduce, sledding with her dogs. It's as much of a throwaway as any scene in the film's collage of moods and feelings over concrete images, but it somehow fits even as it raises yet more questions about this dense film I cannot yet hope to answer. However, it's always helpful when films like this make the prospect of repeated study seem so delightful and irresistible.



*Money is the only thing that keeps Louis and his genuine son together back in France -- the son calls his dad a lunatic but pockets the latest conciliatory payment as he does all the rest -- yet Louis' attempt to pay off his "son" in Tahiti leads the local hired to impersonate the mystery man to balk and run away. For Louis, still unaware of the truth behind the young man who visits him in the hospital, this signifies his son rejecting him just as his heart rejects his body.

White Material

White Material is what Apocalypse Now might have been like if it were entirely from the perspective from the French plantation owners. They reside on the land of their fathers, aware of the world crumbling around them but steadfast in their desire to remain on what they feel is rightfully their property. When someone points out the futility of the situation, they spit at the idea of surrender.

The same holds true for Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a coffee plantation owner. Claire Denis opens her film without any establishment of Maria's plantation and the social structure of the unnamed African country in which she lives. Instead, White Material opens as the country plunges into civil war, the camera gliding over horrific sights such as burning buildings and bodies laying in a line as if even a mass grave is too good for them. Child soldiers, government troops and marauding rebels/pirates scour the landscape.

At the center of them is Maria, who insists upon seeing her crop through to harvest. A helicopter reminiscent of the last chopper out of 'Nam circles over her, begging her to get out while she can. This is the first we've seen the helicopter, but the man with the megaphone says this is his last warning. To drive the point home, he throws down some survival kits as a final measure, the tiny, rectangular packages dropping like massive clumps of volcanic ash on a dusty road that suddenly feels even more arid and desolate. With a vague smirk, Maria continues on home.

Shot mostly with hand-held cameras on grainy stock, White Material initially gives off a hint of realism until Denis begins to twist and bend that aesthetic into her usual, more poetic style. There can be no mistake of the underlying politics of the film -- a vicious attack on European arrogance and privilege concerning Africa and other developing areas of the world -- but the loose plot allows it to broadcast its pedantic message while fleshing it out more subtly through the delicacies and nuance of Huppert's performance.

Saddled with a husband, André, (Christopher Lambert) who attempts to sell the plantation behind Maria's back to "save her from herself" and a feckless son (Manuel, played by Nicolas Duvauchelle) who uses the closing of the schools by rebels as an excuse to sleep in all day, Maria finds herself not only separated from an increasingly hostile indigenous population but from her own family. The only person she enjoys any relationship with is The Boxer (Issach de Bankolé), a rebel leader who hides out on the plantation to recover from a gut wound. Their bond, never particularly spoken, nor even communicate through body language -- both Huppert and de Bankolé are too rigid in their facial expression to let anything but strength radiate from them -- yet they enjoy the most complex relationship in the movie by virtue of one being a rebel seeking to tear down the other's way of life.

Wearing lightly colored clothes that make Huppert's fair skin seem even whiter, Maria looks almost alien among the African people. However, like those plantation owners in the long cut of Apocalypse Now, Maria sees no other option for herself. But in that fatalism lies a grim sense of Eurocentric pride. Huppert, with that stiff upper lip that would have served her well had she been born across the Channel, walks with a steely resolve and never backs down. When a band of rebels stop her truck and demand $100 to pass, she stares down their guns and calmly reminds the young men that she knows their parents as if she caught them trying to T.P. her house. By staying, Maria can look down upon the whites (and even some natives) who flee, but when she heads out to replace her vacated help with some more workers like an American heading to the nearest Home Depot to solicit manual labor, we see through her hypocrisy and realize that she will never be a true native of the country.

Maria says she does not wish to leave for France because she will grow soft and complacent. It's a defiantly feminist moment, and one that darkly suggests that a chaotic situation such as this is the only place where a woman can handle something as big as a plantation by herself. Yet the comforts of her own home far outstrip those enjoyed by poor Africans, and her attitude, delivered with a conviction that might signal her as heroic in another movie, here seems predatory. Along with that vile grin she gives the warning helicopter, this downplayed moment reveals the beast within, a woman who might actually get off on civil war because it allows her to feel superior. She continues to believe that persevering will win the respect of the natives, but they will never see her as one of them. Nothing exemplifies this more than José, the son of Maria's black ex-husband. Implicitly, Maria sees José as proof that she belongs in Africa and dotes upon him, but when she goes to collect him from school she reveals that she has no blood relation to José, nor any bond through marriage now that she and the boy's dad are divorced. She simply appropriates him the way she does everything else; hell, she even asks the boy to help in the field. When he later helps with the mounting mischief around the plantation, it becomes inescapably clear that no one wants Maria to stay.

Just as 35 Shots of Rum made up for its elliptical narrative by anchoring the film in locations, so too do recurring images form the tether that roots us to White Material. André drops his gold lighter, which child rebels pick up and show to The Boxer. The lighter is asinine, expensive and gauche, and it matches the eyesore that is the Vial plantation, parts of which are painted in awful golden-yellow. A gate with a chain and lock is meant to keep the plantation safe, but the guard ran off with the key leaving the padlock undone. Still, people continue to make as if securing the gate, though there are so many holes in the surrounding fence that even the show of pretending the gate works is a waste of time. Hand-held radios broadcast agitprop from a rebel presenter, a presenter who labels all Europeans "white material" and rails against the plantation owners. However, he also has a playful side, and at one point he even stops railing and plays music, bobbing along to the beat in his secret studio. When the official military finds him, they assure the airwaves that everything is under control, only to deliver a message more fearsome than anything the rebel broadcast. (This is foretold earlier in the film when a soldier acts as if Maria's cooperation in paying rebels' tributes makes her worse than the bandits.)

Already a political screed and a character study, White Material also morphs into a horror film through Denis' direction and Yves Cape's cinematography. The use of child soldiers dispenses with the more sensational aspects of City of God to capture the full terror of someone too young to have fully developed empathy being given authority to decide on the lives of others. I've always balked at the idea that children are the portraits of innocence, as that lack of developed empathy makes them selfish, and that romanticized innocence is but a sign that social conditioning and decorum have not been instilled. To see them simply appear on hills in beautifully scary shots engenders a gripping feel, a sense of unstoppable corruption and unyielding bloodlust. So mad are these children that they in turn drive the son, Manuel, to insanity when they beset the plantation and torture the young man with a disturbing mixture of premature hardness and a warped form of childhood playtime.

If White Material is occasionally too cynical and defeatist for its own good, the layers present in Huppert's performance and Denis' politics create a tone poem out of didacticism. One can easily draw parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan from the movie, seeing as how the white person continues to gently exploit indigenous people while hypocritically viewing herself as an equal (but an equal who's better than others), but the core theme of the film is the danger of pride in all its forms. Maria may indeed be too tough for France, but this unspecified country is certainly tougher than her, and the land itself appears to reject her like an immune system to a foreign contaminant. The final moments reveal that White Material's first shots were technically its last, only cementing the sense of inevitability to the destruction that awaits these characters. So set in stone is Maria's fate that when she at last breaks down, I did not react in shock so much as question what took her so long to see this coming.

35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum may be the warmest depiction of an Electra complex ever put to film. In fact, it's such a minutely layered, understated work that to pigeonhole it with such a lazy bit of Freudian explanation does a great disservice to its subtlety. Denis' film is not elliptical, merely unspoken, relying on the faces and slightest action to tell the story. As captured by Agnès Godard's quiet but expressive color palette, 35 Shots of Rum makes cinema of the trace elements of life.

Immediately, the director delves into the dynamic between Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower who conducts RER trains in Paris and its suburbs, and his daughter, Joséphine (Mati Dop), a beautiful graduate student working as a teaching assistant at a local school. Jo spots a rice cooker in a shop window and notes how she wants it, coming home later that day after purchasing one only for her dad to surprise her with the exact same thing. "I didn't think you'd remember," she says gratefully as she keeps her own copy out of sight. One naturally assumes that she doesn't tell her father about the cooker she bought out of consideration, not wishing to hurt his pride, but Denis leaves so much hanging in the air that the audience can think about the nature of the father-daughter relationship. As more pieces fall into place, we can better see that moment as a reflection of the intimate but increasingly impersonal bond that links the two: clearly, the death of the mother brought father and child together, and they care so much for each other that no one else seems to register. Yet that is a relationship based upon convenience and proximity. It's only natural that a family should find comfort in each other following a tragedy, but instead of moving on, Jo and Lionel got used to their bond and do not seek anything that might shake up their lives. Dating is hard; not growing up is easy.

Yet there are several hints that the two do not understand and appreciate how close they are. Jo doesn't expect her dad to remember about the cooker when she is the only woman in his life. In turn, Lionel doesn't even have to play the role of the stern dad when boys come calling because Jo turns them all down on her own. A bouncy, middle-aged cab driver, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), lives in the same apartment complex and clearly has feelings for Lionel, but when she comes looking for her beau, Joséphine turns frigid and lightly confrontational. Whether they realize it or not, father and daughter have created a matrimonial relationship, and they subconsciously act to maintain that thread by edging out any other force.

Slowly, however, the pair come to terms with their existence. Lionel attends a retirement party for his friend René, who smiles good-naturedly at his friends' toasts and gifts but looks slightly troubled. He pops up throughout the film, not saying much with his voice but speaking volumes about the predicament in which Lionel might find himself in a few years: by devoting his life to his job, René has nothing left when he retires. If he ever had a family, his offspring moved on, just as all children, even Jo, must. When he reappears every so often, he hangs in the background, a specter in tiny cafés and bars that Lionel sees in his peripheral vision and cannot shake. Denis intended the film as a loose homage to Ozu Yasujiro (it particularly borrows some elements from Late Spring, and René reflects Ozu's solemn musings on the existentialist nature of industrial livelihood: the man retires in good health, but because he defined himself as a train conductor, his life is over.

Also hanging over Lionel as a dark portent is Gabrielle, whose lovesick longing not only gives the man a chance to change his life path but also shows him the danger of pining for something until it's too late. Gabrielle wants to be with Lionel, and Lionel wants to stay with Jo. But once the young woman can no longer fight the nagging urge to make her own life, what will Lionel have?

Denis' camera moves more than Ozu's, but she displays the same eye for body language and the power of a look. Descas has one of those masterful faces, seemingly chiseled from obsidian and filled with dramatic weight. His is a Stoic look, breaking his poker face only to let the slightest hint of deep pain out from behind those eyes. Dogue, on the other hand, is brilliantly convincing as a lovelorn fool awkwardly attempting to hang around the object of her affection until maybe he accepts her. So convincing is she that I thought less of a middle-aged person trying to find love than a hopeless romantic of a teenager hanging around the school halls doing anything to impress the cool boy or girl. Dogue constantly arcs her back and neck, leaning with all her might to stay in Lionel's sight even as he turns away. Even her smile, radiant and wide, carries a hint of desperation, and she may be more heartbreaking when at her most outwardly cheery than she is when that smile fades.

The film's centerpiece occurs about halfway through the film, as Lionel, Joséphine, Jo's sort-of boyfriend Noé (Grégoire Colin) and Gabrielle pile in Gabby's car to head to a concert. It's a stiflingly uncomfortable ride, with cautious looks exchanged all around and Gabrielle breaking the tension only to add even more awkward silence by saying, "We haven't gone out as a family in years." In the middle of a pouring rainstorm, the cab breaks down, and the four of them all look more relieved to be standing outside pushing the Mercedes minivan down the road than to be back in the car.

When they stop in a bar to dry off, something magical happens. The Commodores' "Night Shift" strikes up on the jukebox, and Denis' camera, formerly the same mix of intimate and detached as the characters themselves, suddenly becomes so sensual your toes will curl. She lingers on Gabrielle's back as revealed in her low-cut dress, the look of nervous, budding love on Noé's face and the self-awareness mounting in Lionel's. Not a single word is spoken, but as partners change hands for friendly but revealing dances, the entire structure of the characters' social order rearranges. From that moment, the inevitability of Jo's progression is made plain, while Lionel continues to swim in circles despite seeing his options clearly for the first time.

Fundamentally, 35 Shots of Rum is about the necessity of living life. When Noé invites Gabrielle and Joséphine to his flat, he discovers his 17-year-old cat dead. Without shedding a tear, he grabs the poor thing by the neck and stuffs it into a trash bag along with toys and all the cat's other "effects." The women, speaking for the audience in this situation, simply gaze in horror and ask sensible questions like "A trash bag?" (which would have been exactly the way I phrased that question, too), but Noé's action shows an exaggerated model for moving on from grief. Buried in Noé's rushed attempt to throw everything away is the desire to not be reminded of his cat's death, but he also frees himself by placing the reminders in the bin. As soon as he finishes, he mentions taking a job overseas, which he can now more easily accept because he does not need to worry about his old, sick cat anymore. It's a bit callous, yes, but Jo understands the deeper meaning, and when she gets home she obsessively cleans the flat of her mother's stuff, trying to throw out the shackles that keep her and Lionel chained to their lives. Lionel, of course, intervenes.

Rarely does the film do anything wrong, but two extraneous scenes do drag the more subtle and evocative story. A scene in Jo's class serves only to bring up Denis' usual attention to race and class dynamics, but it's the only moment of the movie to do so, making the academic arguments of the students regarding international development seem even more stilted and rehearsed. Late in the film, Jo and Lionel head to Germany to visit the dead wife's sister, Jo's aunt. Played by Fassbinder regular Ingrid Caven, the aunt has a monologue that is not so obvious that it detracts from the visually-oriented mood but makes the mistake of trying to put into words what has already been bountifully expressed through the camera.

But these are fleeting moments, hiccups in an eloquent and insightful look at familiar and familial relationships. Much subtler is the symbolism of Lionel's job, always moving but trapped on the same circuit, that small but key distinction from Gabrielle's own status as a public transporter (and is Lionel's name a reference to those train sets that let us play conductor as kids?). Jo's own, part-time job, a music shop clerk, comes right out of adolescence and is as demonstrative of her trapping herself in young adult years. These are symbols handled with a deft hand, open enough to be guessed on a first viewing but left in the hands of the viewer to work out. Thankfully, it is material like this that defines Denis' film, not the minuscule broad moments.

The film ends with Joséphine set to finally move out into her own life, and to commemorate the event, Lionel downs the titular 35 shots in a personal ceremony that looks as much a wake as it does a wedding reception. The final shot shows Lionel coming home with a new rice cooker, one that appears to be made for one, not two. It's a moving moment, but also a hopeful one. We are spared trite epilogues, left instead to ponder whether the man has processed the various clues sent to him about the state of his life and whether he can alter it before the window of opportunity closes. As with everything else in 35 Shots of Rum, these final moments are as haunting as they are affirming. And compared to the films that sandwich it in Denis' canon, it's proof that she is capable of absolutely anything. Americans tend to outdo each other with spectacle; Denis proves her mettle by stripping all away but the essence, and what is left is overwhelming.