“The Intruder” (2005)
Perhaps her most elliptical and sparse, “L’intrus” is a masterwork of Claire Denis’ cryptic and haunted style. Centering on a 70-year-old man with heart problems who seeks a transplant, the clipped picture plays out like a feverish dream. The gorgeously shot and framed film (by frequent cinematographic collaborator Agnes Godard) eschews most narrative constraints to burrow inside the subconscious, blurring dream, memory, and waking-life into an utterly fascinating and breathtaking tactile experience. Enthralling as a largely wordless piece of cinema that radiates like the feeling of hot breath, the picture, unfortunately, loses its way in the third act, when the dying and inscrutable man (Michel Subor) — intriguingly always dreaming of violence — goes in search of a son sired years before in Tahiti. The sustained purity of breathless cinema, captured beautifully in the forest near the French-Swiss border where the man lives, evaporates and we’re lead into a strange last third that looks and feels nothing like this moody metaphysical exploration of questioning the notions of the heart, both literal and metaphorical. It’s a puzzling ending but doesn’t entirely diminish the ravishing opaqueness of what came before.
“35 Shots of Rum” (2009)
Working-class tensions play out in silence; the scene set by the raindrops on the windowsill, the braying of the local train, the click-clack of glasses filled with merry drink. In this effort, Denis observes the curious, world-less formation of a family brought together partially by blood, partially by employment, but also with the love and generosity of those around you. “35 Shots Of Rum” details the transition, from the ones you love to the ones you will love when you realize what exactly are the ties that bind. Love is not enough, argues the wonderfully humanist film, but there is beauty in finding a support system, and establishing your niche with hands held, hips swayed, and eyes locked.
“White Material” (2010)
A thorny picture that is as imperfect as it is enthralling, Denis’ first cinematic trip back to Africa in its racial/geopolitical vagueness is frustrating yet engrossing. Isabelle Huppert plays a haughty, stubborn French coffee plantation owner who refuses to leave her home despite a raging civil war upending the unnamed African country in which they reside. With the country in chaos crumbling around them, her ex-husband (Christopher Lambert) tries to sell her plantation behind her back, and meanwhile, she’s harboring a deposed African revolutionary (Isaach De Bankolé) now wanted very much dead. After an encounter with some child rebels on the wrong end of a machete, her humiliated son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) shaves his head and begins to lose his mind while Huppert’s Maria Vial white goddess character refuses to budge or change her way of life. While clearly a picture about a white landowner hiding a black fugitive in the middle of an African uprising is allegorical of something, what that something is exactly remains elusive. To her credit, Denis is clearly more interested in character than she is in context, but the picture’s refusal to comment on its framework — not mention a confounding violent conclusion — does sometimes feel like a dubious proposition. While it doesn’t always add up, “White Material” is still very much moody and disquieting film.