DVD Review: Bastards (2013)

Now Available to Own   

  Photo Slideshow   

Foreign Title: Les salauds 

When they first appear onscreen, the characters that populate the lurid world of French sexploitation on display in Claire Denis’s latest film move slowly as if in some sort of dreamy, half-conscious trance.

Placed off-center in the frame, captured from the side and/or in the near-constant darkness that pervades, it’s only when we get a close enough look at the reflection of horror staring through the lens back at us through their haunted eyes that we realize that the official Cannes Film Festival selection is depicting a nightmare rather than a dream.

Moving uneasily from gritty Noir inspired neorealism to Denis's own unique brand of ambient expressionism gives Bastards a structure so confounding and fragmented that it’s a miracle if you’re able to put more than just the very basic of plot threads together during the first act.

Although the emotional terrain it travels immediately pulls you along, ultimately Bastards is a moving yet maddening mess of a movie. All over the place from the very beginning, the narrative meanders so puzzlingly that it seems as though it had been edited together by someone that fed a bunch of footage into their computer and just hit shuffle.

While eventually if you’re able to turn off the part of your brain that demands logic, order, reason and common sense, you might find yourself as (un)easily hypnotized as the film’s main character, overall Bastards places too much emphasis on the wrong character’s point-of-view following a devastating tragedy.

Taking a leave of absence from his position as a sea captain to help his estranged sister (Julie Bataille) recover after her husband’s suicide, Marco (Vincent Lindon) arrives to find not only his sister heavily in debt and nearly bankrupt but his teenage niece (Lola Creton) hospitalized after a brutal sexual assault.

Knowing he must step up to take his brother-in-law’s place, Marco rents an unfurnished apartment in the building where the beautiful wife (Chiara Mastroianni) of the man his sister holds responsible for the daughter’s assault and husband’s death lives.

After spying on the woman and her son, Marco begins an affair with his target’s wife and from there the film begins to unravel into clichéd melodrama long before it pays off on the Greek tragic subtext Denis infused the film with from the start.

While the plural nature of the title has already told us that more than one bastard is to blame for the situation (and deep down, we may have begun suspecting the outcome given some of Marco’s discoveries about his sister’s culpability), absolutely nothing could have prepared us for the devastating realization contained in the graphic finale.

Despite this, while being a sea captain hardly prepares one for revenge, we’re never precisely sure just what Marco was thinking when he moved into the building and began inserting himself into Mastroianni's life.

Whether or not he was hoping to seduce the woman for information (before he predictably fell in love with her) or if he was trying to disrupt her home for revenge, we’ll never know but it doesn’t make for an all that compelling or believable plotline particularly given what the film has in store for Marco in the final act.

Though it would’ve been even drearier and that much harder to watch if Denis had opted to start the story earlier, it nonetheless feels disingenuous to broach the topic of sexual exploitation and forced prostitution of a teenage girl without spending more than a fraction of the time with the poor girl and it’s tragic that as a woman, Denis didn’t want to show us more from her point of view.

Overall, Bastards amounts to a missed opportunity to investigate very important and largely unexplored territory that’s become particularly topical in contemporary France in light of recent sex ring scandals. And it’s doubly depressing to broach the subject via characters who appear to be sleepwalking through the horror.

For while the nightmare environment of the film still hits you right where you live, overall Bastards makes about as much sense as a half-remembered dream.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: White Material (2009)

Now Available to Own 

In anticipation for their first cinematic collaboration, actress Isabelle Huppert urged Claire Denis to revisit the same debut novel by Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing that had inspired the filmmaker’s directorial debut two decades earlier wherein Denis blended her own recollections of growing up in Africa with the pages of Lessing's The Grass is Singing to create 1988's Chocolat.

But given the instability of many African countries and the unmistakable message being sent on the evening news to the rest of the world that revealed the violent determination individuals had in rejecting the colonialism of the past to create an unknown future, Denis knew that a straightforward period film adaptation would be a mistake.

Nonetheless, she didn't abandon Lessing's Grass completely since as Huppert intuited, her connection to the work was as strong as it had been back when she spent four years trying to raise enough money to make Chocolat while simultaneously learning the tricks of her eventual trade assisting fellow directors Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch.

Known as a filmmaker driven by her passion for examining the dueling cultures, existential and humanistic questions of identity and the contemporary double standards involving race, gender, sexuality and class in her dual homelands of France and Africa, Denis was struck by the compelling urgency of the contemporary narrative unfolding right before her eyes.

Using the horrific footage she witnessed night after night of French plantation owners being airlifted off their land in the Ivory Coast and the memory of the assassination of Che-like idealistic political leader Thomas Sankara during the production of Chocolat as a starting point, Claire Denis fused fact and fiction together once again to construct what would eventually become White Material alongside award-winning novelist Marie NDiaye.

Yet despite the literary background of Material in the form of Lessing's source material and her collaboration with NDiaye, Denis vowed to stay true to the images and feelings that were evoked in the creative process in a decision that had as much to do with the stylistic success of White Material as it did with its structural failure.

Though it's an overall unflinchingly powerful and undeniably hypnotic motion picture, by adding one experimental technique on top of another including relying far more on the cinematographic language of the camera to tell the story through stark visuals as opposed to doing so with the convention of dialogue, Denis needlessly complicates matters.

Using a nonlinear approach is ambitious enough but when it's sloppily edited and missing a solid “anchor” with which the audience can piece together context clues, the pretentious sense of artistry distracts from the cohesive effectiveness of the work as “art” since Material is so emotionally frustrating and nonsensically narratively challenging that it's riddled with ambiguities on even the most basic level.

With one character referred to as a husband in one review, an ex-husband in another and another described as the child of no less than three different individuals in various essays and articles, it's no wonder that details were lost in the translation.

Tragically even the performances were overwhelmed by Material's approach, which is a particular shame for Isabelle Huppert as her subtle, nuanced portrayal of a woman undone by hubris and extreme tunnel vision that places her own irrational sense of pride over the personal safety of herself and her loved ones, stands up among Huppert's finest work.

Unwilling to follow in the footsteps of the French military and leave her family's coffee plantation that she runs in the unnamed West African country or acknowledge the true extent of the escalating civil war violence taking place just outside her gates in her adopted homeland, Huppert's Madame Vial is a woman driven past the realm of reason.

Huppert, of course is no stranger to depicting varying shades of insanity throughout her varied career as witnessed in multiple Haneke and Chabrol pictures among others. However, in Huppet's unique White portrayal, she imbues her role with an unexpected amount of delicate femininity that's emphasized by the wide static shots from cinematographer Yves Cape (filling in for Denis's longtime DP Agnes Godard) as if she were a China Doll in a Glass Menagerie.

The fragility in the wide shots is sharply contrasted by the flipside of her character – once again interpreted through the language of cinema rather than dialogue – that finds the doll trapped in tight, close-ups with Cape's constantly moving camera before she breaks through the glass ceiling altogether like a lioness protecting her cub... even if she seems less attached to her son than her land.

Gorgeously restored to a brilliant Blu-ray sheen for its Criterion Collection debut, as an experimental exercise in how much substance can be derived from style, White Material is as fascinating as it is infuriating.

Since it's hard to feel connected to characters when you're thoroughly confused, in retrospect I only wish that Denis had stayed truer to literary foundation of Lessing's Grass and/or better utilized the talent of her novelist co-writer.

Nonetheless, when it comes to navigating the psychological, cultural, ethical and geographical terrain of feeling simultaneously connected and disconnected to the countries of France and Africa, there's still no greater cinematic guide for the Material in question than Claire Denis.

Text ©2011, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.