Dir.
Claire Denis, 2004, France, 120min
Cast:
Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Béatrice Dalle
The Intruder exists somewhere between reality and dream, between prose and poetry, between narrative cinema and visual cinema. There are vestiges of plot here and there - a robust but wizened Louis Trebor (Michel Subor) suffers a heart attack while swimming. He abandons his alpine hermitage, his loyal dogs and his estranged son (Grégoire Colin). He obtains a black-market heart transplant in South Korea and sails to Tahiti where it seems he has another long-lost son. Possibly. Any attempt to summarise the plot is largely speculative. The real drama is in the mind of Louis - his nightmares, his memories, his longings. The film is a powerful psychological mosaic of lingering images, exquisitely photographed by Agnès Godard, images which resonate within the film and beyond.
Louis is not so much a character as a product of the imagery which envelops him. Michel Subor's rugged, age-old form seems to embody the spirit of the mountains and the pines amidst which he lives, just as the dying echoes of composer Stuart Staples' electric guitar are his pulse. Images of isolation and confinement (a remote alpine cabin, a hospital bed, a deserted Tahitian island hut) are juxtaposed with images of vast open spaces and emptiness (the ocean, the sky, the far echoes of a gunshot). Images of death (coffins, graves, burial ceremonies) exist beside those of innocence and cleansing (a baby smiles at his father, an old man bathes in a mountain lake). We come to understand Louis not by what he does or says but by what the camera says.
This is, at times, horrific. At one point Louis is dragged through the snow by two horses; later a human heart is found jettisoned on the snow, food for the huskies. Once or twice these episodes are signposted (unusually for Denis) as being dream sequences; but mostly it's not so easy to tell. Cinematically, the dreams are shot through with the same protracted rhythms and trancelike mystery which cloak much of the film. It's never clear where the world of the mind begins and that of the real ends.
It would be simple enough to explain away many of the film's obscurities by ascribing them to the disturbed mind of Denis' protagonist. In which case, then, there is no Russian woman hounding Louis at every step of the journey intent on revenge; neither is there Béatrice Dalle charging through the snow on her husky-led sleigh. These and other women in the film seem to be expressions of Louis' subconscious. And like dream imagery, it is never obvious exactly what they represent - guilt, lust, rejection maybe. But like images in a poem, they connect with something deep inside of us before we necessarily know what they mean.
What about Louis' son and grandchildren with whom Denis spends a lot of screen time before we even meet Louis? These youthful, hearty scenes have an earthy, prosaic quality which the dream sequences don't. And what of the whole concluding episode in which Louis tries to locate his Tahitian son? And the inclusion of old footage from an unreleased movie starring a young Michel Subor? When the body of Louis' son is finally discovered in the Papeete morgue, it is not the body of a Tahitian, but that of Grégoire Colin. Has Louis rejected his own French son for an imaginary Tahitian, a symbol for his own lost Polynesian youth? Is this the root of the insurmountable distance between them?
There are no answers and no two viewers will come to the same conclusion. Neither should they try. The film is not a puzzle to be solved: it is not an attempt to rationalize the irrational, but to visualize it. And it succeeds awesomely. Like many of Denis' films, The Intruder thrives on its ambiguity and contradictions. It manages at once to be oppressively close yet emotionally distant, brutal yet lyrical, grizzly yet graceful.
The Intruder is a film that may not be fully grasped on the first viewing; indeed it is a film that might not be intended to be 'grasped' intellectually at all. It is, above all, a visceral and sensual experience which, as T. S. Eliot once said of poetry, communicates before it is understood.
Simon Gray
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