L'intrus

Like another commentator, I have hoped for a film as good as 'Chocolat' in vain. Still, obscure and rambling as this is, it's interesting, often beautiful, and I sucked some kind of story-satisfaction out of it, perhaps more satisfying because it was hard-won. Less so because some of the puzzles - like why does the protagonist have two identical sons, one in Tahiti and one in France, one alive and one dead? - seem to be there just to obfuscate, as though the film-maker were holding her hand in front of your eyes. Fantasy and symbolism are fine, but there has to be some structure in which to classify and interpret them. Other puzzles, like who most of the characters are and why they are doing what they are doing and what it has to do with the 'story', are part of the challenge of Mlle Denis's narrative technique, which I hope she continues to develop and refine to the point where everyone understands inexpressible things without quite knowing how, instead of not knowing how things are meant to express anything at all.

Two things haunt you throughout L'intrus (The Intruder): who's the intruder and is it a movie or a dream you're watching? The ending is so shocking that for a while you're at a loss for an answer to either of those questions. The intruder pops up as different characters, different men in different circumstances who don't belong in the scene, so they're expelled from it, kindly or brutally, but often without emotional involvement. The main character, Louis, is a contemptible man. He's got rough ways, some mean job and no heart. He needs one and goes after it. He has a heart transplanted and afterwards decides to start a new life. Can this man succeed in his quest for redemption? A guy like that could cut your throat at the drop of a hat. You know it but Claire Denis doesn't encourage you to judge him. Occasionally, there's a young Russian woman -a beautiful girl who seems to inhabit someplace between heaven and earth - who does judge him. She may even punish him. But not Denis. There's the character played by Beatrice Dalle who wants no business with him: don't touch me, she says. But Denis lets this man be himself, films him in his self-absorbed quest. I don't know if what she films is the heart or the mind but it isn't the traditional plot basics. Whatever she films, you get it in the end. You know who's "the" intruder, you know why, more or less, and some scenes come back to your mind with their full meaning. But was it a movie or a dream?

After "Beau travail", everybody was waiting for Claire Denis to make a follow-up masterpiece that never arrived. Now it has. Denis makes a quantum leap in this film, an orgy of gorgeous cinematography, elliptical editing and willfully obscure narrative events that feels strange and acts even stranger. There's a nominal plot (derived partly from the Jean-Luc Nancy book of the same name) about a mature man in need of a heart transplant and who seeks a Tahitian son he abandoned long ago; but mostly it's an exploration of the idea of intrusions personal and cultural. It takes a couple of viewings to fully comprehend, and has pacing problems close to the end, but it's still more advanced and gripping than anything else I've seen this year. Miss it at your peril.

The film is not visually stunning in the conventional sense. It doesn't present a series of pretty pictures. Instead it is a visually interesting film. It forces the viewer to constantly process or perhaps imagine the context of the various shots. This sort of thing is easy to try but hard to succeed at. The film refuses to use the crutch of a genre to help the less than fully engaged viewer get what's going on. Instead the film touches on and moves through a number of different genres. The trick to loving the film is being able to enjoy this playfulness. I suspect 99% of North American viewers will just not get it. If you try to pin down the narrative of this film, or the philosophical message, or the symbolist structure, etc. you will waste your time. There are none of these. The film only feints towards these genres and others at times. The only unifying force in the film is Claire Denis's own sense of what fits together. There are so few feature length films that come close to satisfying Kant's description of what art is, namely the enjoyment of the power of judgment itself instead of simply subsuming experiences under concepts. Film usually takes the easy way out and opts for the simpler pleasure of understanding what's happening. Most film is not art. Most film doesn't come close to art. When a film does, as this one does, and is still enjoyable by a large range of viewers, it's something of a miracle. My on negative comment is that at times I find the film too simplistically buying in to the various narrative threads that run through it. The Tahiti father-son narrative, even though it's not exactly conventional, ends up making things a little to clear and simple. It dominates too much.

Films such as Chocolat, Beau Travail, and others have propelled French director Claire Denis into the top echelon of the world's most unique and accomplished filmmakers and her 2004 film The Intruder (L'Intrus) adds to the depth of her portfolio. A cinematic poem that conveys a mood of abiding loneliness and loss, the film provides a glimpse into the psyche of a man who is deteriorating physically and mentally and who travels to various parts of the globe seeking redemption and peace but finds it hard to come by. Loosely based on Jean-Luc Nancy's memoir of a heart transplant, The Intruder is a film of such unrelenting opaqueness that even after two viewings it is difficult to describe it in other than subjective, impressionistic terms.

Louis Trebor (Michael Subor) is a man in his seventies who is likely dying of a heart condition and who, like the professor in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, attempts to come to terms with the mistakes of his life while he has time. It is clear that he is physically rugged and very wealthy but seems emotionally drained and the look on his face is one of quiet resignation. Though we see only one episode of violence, where he gets out of bed in the middle of night to kill an intruder, there is a sinister sense about him. He might be an intelligence officer, a foreign agent, or a hit man.

Whatever the case, he apparently is under some kind of surveillance and acts like a man that has been involved in criminal wrongdoing and is only now able to see the consequences. Facial close-ups throughout the movie create a strong sense of isolation. He lives with his dogs in a cabin in the Jura Mountains near the French-Swiss border and has an estranged son Sidney (Gregoire Collin) whom he has long neglected. Sidney lives nearby with his wife Antoinette (Florence Loiret-Caille) and their two children. In one telling scene, he meets up with his father on the street and calls him a lunatic, but that does not prevent him from taking his money.

When the film opens, we meet Antoinette, a Swiss border guard, who boards a van with a trained dog to sniff out some contraband. When she comes home, she is greeted by her husband who asks her with tongue-in-cheek if she has "anything to declare?" Other than these three individuals, the people and circumstances we see during the rest of the film may exist only in Louis' imagination. Louis has three women in his life and we meet them all in the film's first half hour: a pharmacist (Bambou) who prepares his medication, a neighbor (Béatrice Dalle) who is a dog breeder who refuses to care for his dogs when he goes away on a trip telling him that they are as crazy as he is, and a young Russian organ dealer (Katia Golubeva) who he tells he wants a "young man's heart".

Relentlessly, she stalks him throughout the film but it is apparently only in his mind. In the last section of the film, Louis travels to South Korea in search of a heart transplant and to Tahiti to deliver a gift to a different son, one whom he has not seen for many years or perhaps has never seen. His heart transplant, however, appears to be a metaphor for a man without a heart, a man whose life has been fascinating but ultimately directionless, intruding into other people's lives with little real empathy. The Intruder contains a haunting guitar soundtrack by Stuart Staples of the band Tindersticks, reminiscent of the guitar riff in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and gorgeous cinematography by Denis regular Agnes Godard.

Godard creates memorable images that convey a mood of longing and regret: a heart beating alone in the snow, an infant in a sling looking up at his father for a good two minutes, the baby's expression gradually turning from morose to a half smile, colored streamers blowing from a newly christened ship, a massage in a dark room by a mysterious Korean masseuse, and the vast expanse of ocean seen from a bobbing ship deck. While The Intruder can be frustrating because of its elliptical nature, Denis forces us to respond out of our own experience, to understand the images on the screen on a very personal level. If there is any theme, a hint might be found in the opening that tells us what is revealed piecemeal in the film - "your worst enemies are hiding, in the shadow, in your heart."