French Film Fest 2005---Claire Denis and Claude Chabrol

Clare Denis and Claude Chabrol

I

The best part of watching Claire Denis’ Intruder—not yet shown in France—was having Denis answer questions afterward in a melodious, halting, long-winded, roundabout, and somewhat evasive way. Having Lou Reed and Willem Dafoe in the audience sitting like anyone else in the fifth row was another bonus and hearing the reverence with which questions were posed to Denis—generally including the word metaphor or significance—a crucial part of entertainment. It was necessary to redeem the evening for me as I was still trying to make simple prosaic sense of 123 minutes of footage. In the absence of this sense, of a tight plot, of a movement from A to B, I needed to be lulled (and not the only one, I noticed) by the lethargic music of Denis’ voice as she told us that for her the film was like an arc. You had to see the gesture, these were not the exact words-it was the gesture of her hand moving across the hemisphere as the protagonist Louis goes from Europe to Tahiti.

Go and watch Intruder if you would like to “watch” “metaphor” on film and a lot(like 80 minutes) of septuagenarian male mammary close-up. Denis said that S.A. Staples who wrote the score wrote a loop, which was not exactly her idea for the film in the beginning but then it worked. Yes, it works. It works because you think you’ll eventually get some answers, some narrative clarity, and that score keeps you hoping till the end when you realize you’re not getting it. What there is to get from this film is vintage Denis, cinema as movement, as poem. Not always my thing but even less so when I’m being promised continually through a somewhat contrived plot that there might be a plot to discern. If you loved Beau Travail you might love this one.

There are many beautiful cinematic moments. Beatrice Dalle on a sledge with a pack of six dogs carrying her through the snow, the camera is jerky and shaky, puts you in the experience. Louis’ dogs eating a heart (is it his? He’s just had a heart transplant). And, the most beautiful, a blind woman in Korea (I believe) giving Louis a massage, feeling his knots, his pain, touching his chest which has been cut open for the heart transplant and grotesquely stitched back. When she touches him we know that she knows everything she knows through her tactility, it’s her way of apprehending the world and she possibly sees what no one else can see about Louis, his haunted past, his pain and needs. That scene is the most precious one in the film and the camera captures it intimately without putting any distance between the viewer and the act.

Why Denis and Chabrol in this one piece? Because as artists they’ve both reached that place where whatever they do is art. But once you reach that place and lose your enemies you could easily find yourself filling their shoes. In Denis’ case the things that make the film work also run counter to it and make it work less rather than more. The film could stand to get rid of 20 if not 30 minutes of footage. Since the plot is loose and disjointed its not hard to do. In its absence all we have is the camera lingering and capturing beautiful things. But the camera lingers too long and fails to escape noise. The editing unfortunately is way too reverent just like most of the questions at Walter Reade were. Some noise can highlight the music, equal decibels of noise and music and the music is lost. Not entirely but a little. In the end the balance isn’t quite there. Denis predicted while introducing the film that the audience would be less enthusiastic and somewhat long-faced when she’d come back for the Q&A after the screening. She was right. But my long face wasn’t because the film was depressing or because of the brutal end but because in the end it had failed to touch me in the places it mattered, my heart, my head, my stomach.


II

Like many others in the Walter Reade last night I had hoped that this Saturday night was going to be the big one. Chabrol and Denis—two masters back to back. When Chabrol’s film opened, the cockles of my heart warmed on seeing the entirely handsome Benoît Magimel impeccably dressed and (playing Philippe) perfect son and brother on the screen. That he caresses and feels particularly attached to the green bust in the garden that the family calls Flore is even more endearing.

Enter Senta The Bridesmaid who resembles Flore the garden bust. They fall in love. The story begins. And we wait till the very end to find out if Senta is a somewhat dreamy girl who spends her time making up macabre stories or stark raving mad. She tells Philippe that all lovers must prove their love for each other by planting a tree, writing a poem, having sex with someone of their own gender, and killing someone. You get the drift.

Claude Chabrol has done too good a job this time round and ended up defeating himself. That Chabrol at seventy-five is engaging with young people and their stories is not in itself a problem. That the film ends up feeling not about adolescence but adolescent is. Senta and Philippe are young but not teenagers, they just seem it in the film. The acting is competent enough, Laura Smet who plays Senta was there for the screening and said that Chabrol hadn’t wanted her to prepare for the film yet she did. Magimel has a lot of finesse and even the minor characters pull through for the most part. The part that is broken and doesn’t work is the love between Senta and Philippe. That love can render people blind is not what is disputable. How someone like Philippe without a grain of darkness in this film can sustain un amour fou for a girl who is at best off her rockers and at worst a killer is never evident, the leap of faith never made. We don’t believe it. For a psychological film like this to work we need to see the psychology at work at some point, either in gesture or dialogue or visually. Possibly Chabrol spent too much time on Smet and ignored Magimel where the key to the leap could have been found.

Smet said to the audience that she had trouble getting out of the mindset of Senta after the film. She had prepared for the film by sleeping a lot and reading the original Ruth Rendell story on which it is based. Senta is a girl who spends a lot of time in isolation and Smet for three or four months after the film found herself also living this life of self-imposed isolation. This is a fine thing for an actress. When someone in the audience asked Smet whether she though Senta was crazy she replied that the girl had un grain but wasn’t crazy mad in her view. I wasn’t alarmed on behalf of Smet because it simply shows that Smet truly put herself in Senta’s head. You and I after seeing the film might and would be right to take cause with that.

I suspect that Chabrol immersed himself so completely in the story that like Smet he could no longer clearly see the girl for what she was. If he had approached the story with full-on adolescent vigor as a story seen only through Senta’s eyes I think it would have been more successful though possible even less palatable to the audience.