Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis
by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards
is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists
in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a
straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic
fragments that have become Denis's stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in
the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of
beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring
out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels
roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man's body
splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background
as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L'Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part
of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view
of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces
fit together in a precise way we're simply not allowed to know until we've
arrived through the movie's own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate
pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis's eleven
features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then
reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.
Vincent Lindon, the sad-eyed, almost
absurdly masculine half of the couple in Vendredi soir, plays Marco, a
tanker captain whose gilded watch and tailored dress shirts betray a man
born into wealth. His days at sea numbered, Marco is drawn into the disturbing
world of the family he'd left behind, prompted by the sudden death of a
brother-in-law whose debt-ridden final days put him in the pocket of sleazy
financier Eduard Laport (Michel Stubor). In exchange for his company's bailout,
it's suggested, Laport brought Marco's niece (Lola Creton, the woman we see
wandering in the opening montage) into an underground sex syndicate, seriously
abusing and brainwashing her in the process. Enter Marco as the disgraced,
bankrupted family's official sin eater: Summoned back to Paris, he hocks his
Alfa Romero for liquid cash and settles into the same posh building as Laport,
hoping to insinuate himself in the bastard's life by striking up an affair with
the man's neglected, much younger wife, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni).
Despite its elliptical presentation, which
has us holding most of the major narrative blocks in the air until we know
where to sequence them, this is a surprisingly linear story for a filmmaker
prone to fruitful asides–the young lovers indulging in a long kiss over the
opening credits of Trouble Every Day, for example, held and then
discarded; or the spectral appearances of Yekaterina Golubeva in L'Intrus.
Here, even the initially opaque details–a family heirloom in a pawn-shop
window, the body in the street–all have a teleological function in the grand
design. Indeed, Denis seems more interested this time in playing with our
desire–born of and indulged by the revenge-thriller genre–to see an
ostensibly free agent like Marco become a power player, avenging his family
against a corrupt man and scoring a point for justice in the process. That
desire, the picture suggests, is a fruitless one when the pieces are ultimately
all there regardless of the precise order in which they'll fall. Marco, then,
is simply playing out his family script, his actions and their ultimate success
or failure directed by an indifferent air-traffic controller.
Bleak as that may sound, not even this
fatalistic progression (the ominous sense, throughout, that things are winding
down to a bad end) prepares us for the dire coda, a sign-off that outdoes the
finales of both Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and David Cronenberg's Videodrome, each of which Bastards resembles, for pure, radioactive cynicism. Closing
with the video evidence we've long been promised, Denis lands on not justice
but its demonic parody, as blurry images of the family's grotesque home movies,
in a manner of speaking, play out against the arpeggiated synths of Tindersticks'
"Put Your Love in Me," a kind of nightclub anthem for
the undead. The most corrosive work of a master filmmaker, Bastards lingers in the mind for days after you've see it,
though you wish it wouldn't.
Bastards opens today at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox, anointing the essential month-long chronological retrospective "Objects of Desire: The Cinema of Claire Denis." Visit the TIFF website for more details.
