Les salauds (2013) Reviews

• In sex as in colonial politics, the victims submit to their masters.

  maurice_yacowar2013-10-14

  Claire Denis' Bastards is about bastards, alright, specifically bastards who sexually abuse those who are dependent upon them. The theme obviously reflects upon dysfunctional family relationships and the tacit complicity that allows sexual exploitation to flourish. But in the context of Denis' other work the domestic sexual dynamic points to a larger, political issue: the victim's complicity in his/her/their victimization. At a time where there are political uprisings everywhere, where the longtime colonized cry out for their independence, integrity and freedom, Ms Denis' point is this: We still need more rebellions. Too many colonizers are clinging to power because their victims let them. In the film the hero Marco (Vincent Lindon) moves between two mothers and their domineering masters. His sister, to whom he ceded the family's thriving women's sexy shoe manufacturing company, watched her husband run the business into bankruptcy. She has also watched him turn their daughter Justine (Lola Creton), whose very name evokes a Sadean symphonic, into a druggie, sex object and suicide. This mother pleads helplessness, blaming everyone -- her brother, her husband, the doctor, the cops, her daughter -- for Justine's horrid fate, without ever acknowledging her own abdication of parental responsibility. She especially blames her husband's wealthy powerful partner Laporte (Michel Subor) both for her husband's suicide and their daughter's seduction. The latter charge proves imprecise, as the home movies ultimately reveal Laporte only a witness to Justine's abuse by her father. Laporte figures more prominently in the other relationship. He has fathered a son with the beautiful Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni), who lives in a lavish apartment Laporte funds in Marco's apartment building. Whatever his initial motives, Marco finds a genuine passion in his relationship with Raphaelle and affection in her son. In a fugitive hint of incest his lover looks just like his sister but for the former's odd mole. Marco abandons his seafaring career -- the happy life of the loner, a captain who from his family's perspective has fled his responsibilities -- in order to save his sister and niece.His involvement with Raphaelle brings him closer to the evil magnate Laporte but at the cost of Raphaelle keeping her son. To serve her vile master she opts to kill her lover Marco instead of him. Thus the colonized kiss the hand that stifles them, or caress the rod that rules them.

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• The mood

  JulienPlante2014-01-24

  I realised after watching Bastards that I am a Claire Denis fan. I appreciate her entire body of work and I knew early on she was one of my favourite directors. Each film she has made has moved me and stayed with me. I like her way of filming a story. She never spells the story out for us, none of the characters come out and tell us how they are feeling; instead we have to find our own way into their worlds with visual clues. It is for us to see and follow, to be active in our observations. Somehow Claire Denis manages to reveal things to us in a soft, unassuming way, which then affects us when we read the intense and often deeply buried emotion that spills out. For the making of Bastards, Claire Denis has returned to her team of long-time collaborators, including cinematographer Agnès Godard, indie band Tindersticks for their atmospheric soundtrack, and actors like Vincent Lindon, Gregoire Colin and Michel Subor. With Bastards, Chiara Mastroianni (Beloved) joins this entourage, as does Lola Créton (Goodbye First Love, Something in the Air). While Mastroianni gives her best performance on screen, Créton reveals a lot of herself without ever actually saying more than a few words. Viewers that have not seen any of her previous films may find it harder to appreciate the qualities and intensity of the movie. We are quickly drowning in a story where nearly every character is not likable - here the title Bastards feels very apt. It's a dark and raw film. It has the shadowy mystery of The Intruder, the emotional disturbance of Trouble Every Day, and the intimacy of Vendredi Soir. It's a sordid and brutal revenge drama, but it's also a true modern film noir. Enigmatic and detailed, with dark textures. Sharing with us the fragile and troubled human condition, the characters' bodies are explored in close up, the texture of the skin, the marks and blemishes staring back at us. But, ultimately, what Denis nails every time is the mood. The unseen, unheard mood. The impression we are left with, the vibrations of human energy. This is the real mark of a Claire Denis film.

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• Where is the passion?

  gergelyh-155962015-12-16

  This film seems to me strangely overrated here. The story is promising indeed but not very well executed. All the people, especially the evil ones, act mechanically here -- even the sinful SM orgy is done apathetically, like some boring work routine. The weakest part is Raphaelle's character, very underwritten and Chiara Mastroianni cannot compensate for this either. She should be deeply content and at the same time desperate in the role of maitresse/mother, should be very beautiful and exciting (what she is not, she's not ugly but worn out) to explain even a cold affection from the part of the demanding M. Laporte and Marco's un-tactical fit of passion in the end. There should be chemistry between her and Marco from the beginning, but we do not see that and her involvement with him feels totally unfounded. Actually they seem to feel awkwardly when together, even their lovemaking is hard to watch, rough but not passionate and hardly the source of emotional satisfaction she must have missed with Laporte... Even her life with her son lacks any vitality, we could as well look at two customers in a furniture store. Theoretically we know what she is expected to feel -- or the suspenseful ending would not be believable - - but it is only a cold knowledge. Cinematography is surprisingly bad sometimes: the way the important car crash is filmed usually can be seen in very old and very low-budget movies only. The good parts: Vincent Lindon tries his best, he feels genuine in this hard role. Music is more than adequate. Plus the vintage Alfa Romeo, well, *that* is a masterpiece.

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• Invoking ambiguity as a demon

  chaos-rampant2014-03-16

  Oh boy. Truly brace yourself for this one. Read nothing about it, know that vaguely it is about evil, and just plunge into it. Others will in due time cleanly explain the plot, if they haven't already. In a nutshell there's a mother who is partly responsible for letting her daughter stray in drugs and prostitution and her brother who comes to investigate what happened. But the point is to not have a scaffold as you watch. Yes, we were all as confused as you up to some point, it's designed that way. There's no pretension in the sense of trying to make you feel stupid for not 'getting it'. You have to simply stay there as sense bleeds into anxious confusion. It's what the film is about and made so it happens across the whole film to you. Okay, the idea is that some things are so horribly dark and beyond sense that deviously they rearrange the soul of the viewer and create a film like this to shroud themselves in. Lynch works in a comparable way. To avoid spoilers, let's just say here it's tied to sexual abuse. What happened is so unfathomable it appears to curse the reality of the film in the following way: some things happen now, some in one character's dreams, some in another's, some are woven together to conceal what they suggest. It's a deliberate choice for example to have the sister and mistress next door look alike so when the brother has sex with her we register the hum of an unspoken evil - this is so bold, and risky, and at the expense of an easy viewing. Denis wants you to feel this hum. Risky because maybe 1 in 10 viewers will embrace the cognitive dissonance. Some parts completely bend causality: so when the man goes to his sister's house to sell his Alfa Romeo to a husband we know is dead at some point, trying to place that in the timeline causes us to hallucinate. Some are shot to appear as if in the past: the notion that the brother and mistress perhaps knew each other and scheme together, causing us to hallucinate a possible past story. Another is placed in the following startling way: a mysterious snippet of a few seconds shows policemen search the woods only to find the boy's yellow bicycle, it's never apparent where this fits in the flow until we've seen the whole thing through and assume it was probably the mother's anxious dream, yet in the moment and afterwards we process it with the same premonition it's being dreamed. Has it happened? Is it going to? Just the other day I wrote about another Denis film, how trying to present an inner transformation indirectly brought her in line with every other filmmaker currently worth knowing in the search for a new visual logic for the transcendent stuff. Inland Empire is Lynch's latest answer to that. Malick works in the calligraphic eye. Reygadas recently had a an ambitious failure after a great success. Little did I know she was incubating something as profoundly challenging as this. Here we are made to hallucinate, to create a troubling past, to get it wrong in the attempt to get it right - mirroring the brother's investigation. It haunts because what's wrong here that appears this way? A film like Seven is the most basic setup of this effort to decipher. We are able to predict the machinations (Biblical murder) but not not why or when. So we wonder and stress. Nothing's wrong with us, it's just some evil out there, the world makes perfect sense without it. On the higher end of sophistication there's Mulholland Dr. where we begin experiencing mysterious events but something's amiss about their mechanism, something is changing the whole sense of the world. This is similar, something from the inside is preventing sense. It won't have anywhere near Mulholland's visibility, because it's shot with a realistic bend to make everything appear on the same ground. Denis was lucky to have known Tarkovsky where the inspiration for the visual logic appears to come from, but she hasn't mastered flow the same way. She isn't seductive like Lynch. There are no mystical elements, only a drab mystery that confounds. Some things are so intimately dark we create ignorance to prolong having to know. So we watch this in the same ignorance and confusion until it reveals itself to be about an incomprehensible evil. This is the only reason I keep from fully endorsing this. So we'll either leave this ignorant of what it was or realize in the end that we can't really know this much ignorance. Why did he do it? I predict it won't fare particularly well, which is a shame. Here is some of the most striking cinematic craft right now for me. I mean, if someone asked me, what's a film that is at the forefront of cinematic advance on how we make sense, I would say right here. Know this, know the internal logic. Keep it in yourself in just that way until you decide to discard it.

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• With nods to film-noir and Faulkner's Sanctuary Claire Denis paints an obscure picture of ill-fated family ties and the futile banality of vengeance.

  LeCadavreExquis2014-07-13

  The three female characters in Claire Denis' willfully obscure – visually as well morally, but also plot-wise - spin on the often exploitative genre of the revenge film, look eerily alike. Much to the confusion of some viewers, but there's a thematic reasoning behind this casting choice. Before I delve further into this, I'd like to consider the generic conventions of the revenge film and how they relate to Les Salauds. Convention dictates that a male protagonist, a lone wolf, returns to what is often his home town to avenge some evil done to his family or someone that was once close to him where institutionalized authority – police, justice – has failed. Although often not without moral ambiguity usually there's a sense of exploitative glorification of violence inherent to the genre's an eye for an eye ethics. In Les Salauds however the violence is dimly lit, often clumsy – not unlike a real fight. There are no one punch knock-outs, or drawn out choreography, just awkward, quickly dissolving scuffles that leave the chain-smoking protagonist gasping for air. As is illustrated by her depiction of violence Denis' film can admittedly be described within the vague generic outlines of the revenge film, but she skillfully uses its tropes to tell a story that is much more morally complex, that raises more questions than it answers - for the male protagonist as well as the audience - but even more so she uses this intrinsically male narrative and retells it by foregrounding the feminine characters. Marco has fled from the world of femininity leaving behind his wife, sister, daughters, niece and a family business of women's (!) shoes. After returning to his past he's never able to clearly see what he's gotten himself into - the truth is as obscure as the film's visual style – and his actions are motivated by the connection he has to the three main female characters. What binds these women – as a group, but in a sense also as individuals – is their passivity. Yet their submissiveness is not unambiguous, as they make a more or less deliberate choice to subjugate themselves to a dominant male. Their relationship to the males is, albeit somewhat masochistically, to a degree symbiotic. Although the motives of every character in this film are murky and veiled, the viewer can infer what the women have to gain from their position of passiveness: a glamorous lifestyle and a child that's well taken care of (Raphalle), the possibility to attribute your downfall and moral failure as a mother to the (absent) male other (Sandra), or the hazy seduction of amorous and druggy transgressions (Justine). If these women act, running away or even if they fire a gun – which could be considered the ultimate act – they do so to ultimately solidify their position of dependence on some male 'salaud', bastard.

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