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DIRECTED BY: Claire Denis
FEATURING: Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katerina Golubeva, Bambou, Béatrice Dalle
PLOT: Having received a new heart via transplant, a man reassesses his priorities and goes in search of rapprochement with his estranged son.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Claire Denis crafts a film that may be entirely metaphorical. Under the pretense of narrative, she links together a series of scenes that are best explained as analogues for the brain’s capacity to remember past events and to imagine future ones, often imperfectly. You can’t believe anything you see in L’intrus, and everything in L’intrus is true.
COMMENTS: Sometimes a film will have its script credited as “inspired by” some other work, often as a ploy to forestall the payment of rights and residuals. However, the term could not be better suited to describe the way this film is informed by the memoir/philosophical treatise of the same name that Jean-Luc Nancy penned about his own heart transplant and the subsequent dissociation he felt from his own body. Claire Denis crafts characters and situations that have no connection to the philosopher: Nancy never kept a string of lovers in the frozen tundra, or abandoned a son he had fathered in French Polynesia, or killed a man in cold blood. Yet our hero Louis seems to be living out the emotional experiences that Nancy encountered. Truly, she was inspired.
We know that Louis is facing a health crisis, one that necessitates the acquisition of a new heart. His circumstances are such that not only can he get it without difficulty, but he’s in a position to make demands. “I want a young heart,” he tells his organ broker. “Not an old man’s heart, or a woman’s heart.” It’s the arrogant proclamation of the rich, knowing he can get anything he wants and uninterested in who might suffer as a consequence. Up to this point, Louis lives a charmed life, residing in the mountains with a mistress, a pair of loyal dogs, and not a care in the world. His new heart will not only upend his existence, but shatter his confidence. Much of L’intrus is committed to watching his sense of control and certainty steadily unravel. Maybe you can have it all, but you rarely can keep it.
Denis teases us with genre expectations. When Louis visits a Swiss bank to obtain the money for his operation, we’re inclined to think that he’s some sort of retired secret agent or assassin putting his illicit earnings to work, but the film provides no evidence for that scenario, and the brush with “spy thriller” soon gives way to another mood. Louis’ quest to reconnect with his lost son feels like it will head to a meeting of tremendous importance, but Denis has no interest in such melodramatics. There’s reason to believe that Louis is confronted with a horrible twist at film’s end, but given all we’ve seen, this could easily just be a visual metaphor for the guilt he feels, or a flash-forward to an event that ties together two characters who have stayed far apart, or simply a dreaded outcome given form. We’ll never know for sure, and the feeling is the point, anyway.
What’s most unsettling, the thing that makes the ground so unsteady for the viewer, is that Denis uses the language of film in service of a presentation that intends to do none of the things that we expect a film narrative to do. We’re used to unreliable narrators and visualizations of things that never happened, but Denis provides no guide to help us sort one from another. We are familiar with nonlinear narratives, but we usually count on signifiers to help us work out the chronology in our own heads. We even understand the tricky nature of the Kuleshov effect—using edits to put two scenes together in a kind of shared meaning. Denis uses that technique as a cudgel to shame us out of our assumptions, following a lengthy scene of a grave being dug with a shot of the expected corpse recuperating in a hospital. We don’t have names (the dogsledder played by Dalle is identified in the credits as “The Queen of the Northern Hemisphere”), we don’t have places so much as climates, and we have so little dialogue that every word becomes laden with meaning. Denis is not here to play ball with us, and she makes sure we know it.
Even if you are familiar with Denis’ penchant for obscuring meaning, L’intrus is an impressively opaque work. It also happens to be a strikingly beautiful movie. Cinematographer Agnès Godard captures the exotic beauty of Tahiti, but she also finds character in a South Korean ship foundry or a remote border crossing. Faces look remarkable, too, especially that of Subor, whose handsome aged looks remain striking even when prone in bed running his fingers along the fresh transplant scar on his chest. The majestic professionalism of the production only enhances the sense of disassociation: how can you look at something so immaculately conceived and not be able to figure out what’s going on? You can, though, and Denis seems to think that you should. Maybe to recognize that fact, what you need is a whole new heart.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by russa03. Then eight years later, Cliff Williams nominated it anew. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
