Loosely adapted from an autobiographical memoir by Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis’ L’intrus chronicles the retired life and career of ex-mercenary Louis Trebor (stolidly played by Michel Subor) in what constitutes a visually arresting – albeit glacial in its storytelling – meditation on age, living, and the fact of growing estranged from the world.
Spun over the countries of France, Japan and Polynesia, the narrative undulates between the lives of various, disparate people, many of whom are only touched upon briefly. Centrepiece to the film is the figure of Trebor, a grizzled semi-mute, whose pastoral livelihood in the French mountains – activities of swimming, cooking, and attending to his dogs – is uprooted by the timely need for a heart transplant, loosely evolving (as noted by the late Philip French) into a type of ‘metaphor’ for the film itself. Around this transplant (itself a foreign, intruding object) do ideas of intrusion pivot, carefully captured in the illegal border crossings nearby, the unwanted kindness from those closest, and in the brief moments of surveillance that take place over the rolling countryside. From here, Denis’ traffics into the industrial, polluted landscape of Japan, where a black-market offer is available for a price. It is taken (despite the source of money never being accounted for), before the narrative finally segways into Tahiti, in Polynesia, where a futile search is taking place for a long-forgotten son. Each frame of Denis’ obscure triptych feeds into the next, as evident, yet in its slow progression so are things forgotten, people somewhat evaporating into the narrative much like its coherence and sense of time.
It is a journey – if perhaps that is the most accurate way of describing it? – that, whilst navigating the traumas of the past, also appears to forget what has occurred, people, events and motive appear in the narrative only to then disappear. “You’re worst enemies are hiding inside you, in the shadows, in your heart”, opens L’intrus, a first clue to this ambiguation.
It is unlikely that every viewer would discern the same details in the film, or that, on re-watching it perhaps, they would necessarily understand things in the same way. Not dissimilar to the later, poetic works of Jean Luc-Godard – chiming to the inaccessible Hail Mary, In Praise of Love, or the portentous Film Socialisme – so is there a lumbering, philosophical weight to each moment of Denis’ picture, one that never truly pays off in its dialogue or characterisation. Scenes are long, images half-muffled, and whatever relationship is delineated between each third is gradually reduced by its cold, frigid tone. Following a screening at the Toronto film festival, Denis remarked on the imbalanced nature of her film output: “They have a limp, or one arm shorter than the other, or a big nose”, an anatomic discrepancy that translates (not intentionally, I would imagine) into the wayward, collapsing sense of L’intrusand its narrative of loss and no retrieval.
Nebulous, free-floating, with moments of wonder and brilliance, L’intrus is a challenging watch, yet ultimately worth the time.
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