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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
This gripping French film may sneak into your soul and affect you profoundly, even if you haven't a clue what it's about.
Michel Subor in "The Intruder."
Dec 23, 2005 | I wouldn't trust anyone who claims to understand, in a literal sense, Claire Denis' "The Intruder." The picture -- which opens Friday in New York, with dates in other parts of the country (one hopes) to follow -- is based on French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's memoir of his own heart transplant, although Denis calls it an "abduction" rather than an adaptation. And the picture is a kind of seizure, a baffling work that demands your complete engagement and then leaves you feeling stranded and yet fascinated, trying to track down the information that appears to be missing -- but also feeling as if you've just lived something.
"The Intruder" -- its French title is "L'Intrus" -- is exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of picture you don't bounce back from immediately. Yet its elusiveness is the very source of its poetic energy. You may walk out of "The Intruder" feeling angry with Denis for not providing enough clues to what it all means. (At a New York preview screening this past spring, an irate audience member got into an argument with Denis, demanding to know what the movie was "about.") Or maybe you'll be angry because the movie does make sense, but in a way so primal that you can't begin to articulate it -- a click that happens in a place where words can't possibly reach. Either response suggests that "The Intruder" has gotten to you.
Denis starts off by telling us everything we need to know with the movie's opening line: "Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in your heart." We never really learn much about the characters in "The Intruder"; we have to rely on what we can infer about them, and even then, we can never be sure we're getting it right. The French actor Michel Subor -- of Godard's 1963 "Le Petit Soldat," and also the narrator of Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" -- plays a man named Louis Trebor, a loner who lives in a remote country house with his two dogs, hardy, cold-weather creatures with thick golden coats and alert eyes. We see Louis having a swim on a day that looks none too warm, or bicycling steadily down a country road, the muscles in his legs looking like those of a man 30 years younger. (Louis appears to be somewhere in his 60s.) He's completely comfortable with his body: It's sturdy and solid and not at all frail. He has a girlfriend, a pharmacist (the actress who plays her is named Bambou), who sometimes comes to visit him; they make love with aggressive erotic tenderness, and not tentatively or haltingly, the way, when we're young, we usually imagine older people make love.
But perhaps Louis' vitality is all on the surface: His swim is interrupted by pain -- he clutches his arm and makes his way toward shore, where his dogs anxiously wait for him. (Denis asked Subor, in preparation for the role, to listen to the late recordings of Johnny Cash, as a way of connecting with a man getting ready to meet death.) Later, he types out a cryptic message, in Russian, on his computer (or what we assume to be his computer): "I opt for the emergency solution."
Those are just the most immediately accessible narrative shards of "The Intruder." We come to learn -- or, again, to infer -- that Louis has bought a new heart for himself on the black market. "I want a young heart," he demands of the mysterious Russian woman (Katia Golubeva, of Leos Carax's "Pola X") in charge of arranging the details. "Not an old man's heart, or a woman's heart." We don't know exactly where, when or how the transplant takes place, but we do, eventually, see the scar, two lightning jags of pinkish tissue that cross his chest.
