Les Salauds

I realised after watching Bastards that I am a Claire Denis fan. I appreciate her entire body of work and I knew early on she was one of my favourite directors. Each film she has made has moved me and stayed with me.

I like her way of filming a story. She never spells the story out for us, none of the characters come out and tell us how they are feeling; instead we have to find our own way into their worlds with visual clues. It is for us to see and follow, to be active in our observations. Somehow Claire Denis manages to reveal things to us in a soft, unassuming way, which then affects us when we read the intense and often deeply buried emotion that spills out.

For the making of Bastards, Claire Denis has returned to her team of long-time collaborators, including cinematographer Agnès Godard, indie band Tindersticks for their atmospheric soundtrack, and actors like Vincent Lindon, Gregoire Colin and Michel Subor.

With Bastards, Chiara Mastroianni (Beloved) joins this entourage, as does Lola Créton (Goodbye First Love, Something in the Air). While Mastroianni gives her best performance on screen, Créton reveals a lot of herself without ever actually saying more than a few words.

Viewers that have not seen any of her previous films may find it harder to appreciate the qualities and intensity of the movie. We are quickly drowning in a story where nearly every character is not likable - here the title Bastards feels very apt.

It's a dark and raw film. It has the shadowy mystery of The Intruder, the emotional disturbance of Trouble Every Day, and the intimacy of Vendredi Soir. It's a sordid and brutal revenge drama, but it's also a true modern film noir. Enigmatic and detailed, with dark textures. Sharing with us the fragile and troubled human condition, the characters' bodies are explored in close up, the texture of the skin, the marks and blemishes staring back at us.

But, ultimately, what Denis nails every time is the mood. The unseen, unheard mood. The impression we are left with, the vibrations of human energy. This is the real mark of a Claire Denis film.

BASTARDS focuses on the experiences of sea-captain Marco (Vincent Lindon), who returns from his ship to find his sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) in trouble. He moves into the apartment above rich business person Edouard (Michel Subor), whom Sandra holds responsible for her troubles. As Marco becomes more involved in the case, so he discovers to his cost that the intrigues are more complicated than he anticipated. Set in contemporary Paris, Claire Denis creates a claustrophobic thriller, full of close-ups and tight two-shots in which the protagonists' faces seldom fall out of view. This helps reinforce the film's principal theme, which is to show how actions often have unforeseen and unintended consequences. Although Marco believes he is doing the right thing, his actions are misunderstood to such an extent that Edouard moves away, taking Sandra's little son with him. Perhaps this is due to Sandra's penchant for not telling Marco the truth about herself and her life; but Denis seems to suggest that Marco fails to consider the ways in which his behavior might be viewed by others. We never know who the "bastards" of the film actually are; perhaps it's one of those terms of abuse that people apply to others, especially when they are in tight situations. The plot remains taut throughout, and there is an unexpected dénouement that deserves our attention. Definitely worth a watch.

Hard hitting, beautiful, feminist and intelligent, the film is not an easy watch. The story is not told in a straightforward way and things do not go the way we expect. Tough and torrid, the tale unfolds in many different ways before us and we struggle, as does the main protagonist, to deal with what turns out to be an almost labyrinthine problem - even though we are only really talking about a couple of guys, their women and some girls. So beautifully is this shot that there were occasions where I seemed to miss a plot point, so in awe of the way some 'ordinary' scene was portrayed, and I assume this was intentional, one of the various means by which we become side-tracked here until faced with the awful and final denouement.

Oh boy. Truly brace yourself for this one.

Read nothing about it, know that vaguely it is about evil, and just plunge into it. Others will in due time cleanly explain the plot, if they haven't already. In a nutshell there's a mother who is partly responsible for letting her daughter stray in drugs and prostitution and her brother who comes to investigate what happened.

But the point is to not have a scaffold as you watch. Yes, we were all as confused as you up to some point, it's designed that way. There's no pretension in the sense of trying to make you feel stupid for not 'getting it'. You have to simply stay there as sense bleeds into anxious confusion. It's what the film is about and made so it happens across the whole film to you.

Okay, the idea is that some things are so horribly dark and beyond sense that deviously they rearrange the soul of the viewer and create a film like this to shroud themselves in. Lynch works in a comparable way. To avoid spoilers, let's just say here it's tied to sexual abuse.

What happened is so unfathomable it appears to curse the reality of the film in the following way: some things happen now, some in one character's dreams, some in another's, some are woven together to conceal what they suggest. It's a deliberate choice for example to have the sister and mistress next door look alike so when the brother has sex with her we register the hum of an unspoken evil - this is so bold, and risky, and at the expense of an easy viewing. Denis wants you to feel this hum. Risky because maybe 1 in 10 viewers will embrace the cognitive dissonance.

Some parts completely bend causality: so when the man goes to his sister's house to sell his Alfa Romeo to a husband we know is dead at some point, trying to place that in the timeline causes us to hallucinate. Some are shot to appear as if in the past: the notion that the brother and mistress perhaps knew each other and scheme together, causing us to hallucinate a possible past story.

Another is placed in the following startling way: a mysterious snippet of a few seconds shows policemen search the woods only to find the boy's yellow bicycle, it's never apparent where this fits in the flow until we've seen the whole thing through and assume it was probably the mother's anxious dream, yet in the moment and afterwards we process it with the same premonition it's being dreamed. Has it happened? Is it going to?

Just the other day I wrote about another Denis film, how trying to present an inner transformation indirectly brought her in line with every other filmmaker currently worth knowing in the search for a new visual logic for the transcendent stuff. Inland Empire is Lynch's latest answer to that. Malick works in the calligraphic eye. Reygadas recently had a an ambitious failure after a great success.

Little did I know she was incubating something as profoundly challenging as this. Here we are made to hallucinate, to create a troubling past, to get it wrong in the attempt to get it right - mirroring the brother's investigation. It haunts because what's wrong here that appears this way?

A film like Seven is the most basic setup of this effort to decipher. We are able to predict the machinations (Biblical murder) but not not why or when. So we wonder and stress. Nothing's wrong with us, it's just some evil out there, the world makes perfect sense without it. On the higher end of sophistication there's Mulholland Dr. where we begin experiencing mysterious events but something's amiss about their mechanism, something is changing the whole sense of the world.

This is similar, something from the inside is preventing sense. It won't have anywhere near Mulholland's visibility, because it's shot with a realistic bend to make everything appear on the same ground. Denis was lucky to have known Tarkovsky where the inspiration for the visual logic appears to come from, but she hasn't mastered flow the same way. She isn't seductive like Lynch. There are no mystical elements, only a drab mystery that confounds.

Some things are so intimately dark we create ignorance to prolong having to know. So we watch this in the same ignorance and confusion until it reveals itself to be about an incomprehensible evil. This is the only reason I keep from fully endorsing this.

So we'll either leave this ignorant of what it was or realize in the end that we can't really know this much ignorance. Why did he do it?

I predict it won't fare particularly well, which is a shame. Here is some of the most striking cinematic craft right now for me. I mean, if someone asked me, what's a film that is at the forefront of cinematic advance on how we make sense, I would say right here. Know this, know the internal logic. Keep it in yourself in just that way until you decide to discard it.

An alienated man returns to Paris in heavy rainfall in an attempt to mend family affairs in the wake of a suicide and substantial monetary damage. He discovers that human hearts, including his own, are not as repairable as he would prefer. Director Claire Denis displays a mastery of imagery, detail, tension and emotion in a dark story that goes back and forth in time and patiently reveals secrets. The introverted characters of her story attempt to react with confidence and courage to the bleak circumstances, malevolent figures, and fears that hem them in, yet their trust and hope hang on a thread. The film is enthralling, dark and brooding.