BASTARDS: GAMES OF CONFLICTS BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE INDIAN EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, INDIA JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF INDIA AND FRIBOURG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWISS 44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF INDIA, GOA, 2013 Print Clair Denis seems to have liked making her current film under review with a thriller format. It narrates the requisite locked attic door in a haunted-house story, The elliptical narrative opens Claire Denis’s murky, rain-soaked, cunningly upsetting film noir could be concealing anything—but it’s hard to imagine they’re hiding anything you’d want to see for yourself. Bastards is her very taut narrative in decades, so to say. However, that’s not immediately apparent from the film’s opening series of vignettes: we see a well-dressed man straightens his tie in a dark, lonely office; a woman is led slowly away from a crime scene; a teenage girl romps home through the lamp-lit streets of Paris wearing only a pair of five-inch heels. As the film continues, bound details, facts, clues, and connections start to open up at painfully spaced-out intervals. The story, when it eventually emerges, concerns ship’s captain Marco who goes AWOL and rushes home following his brother-in-law’s suicide and the hospitalization of his young niece Justine only to get caught up in the machinations of a depraved, sunken-eyed financier. It’s not clear what makes Denis’s trail of bread crumbs so thrilling to follow. But we are sucked into an element of morbid curiosity, but there’s also the urge not to leave any shadows unexplored. Some handful of critics have suggested, something questionable about Denis’s choice to make a film about victimhood that refrains from exploring the psychology of the victims? For all clinical soulfulness, Justine remains an opaque enigma, while Chiara Mastroianni, playing Subor’s mistress, parades loneliness and desperation. Marco makes him an entry point into running sufferings, and he’s as much an outsider as we are. Really, a passive, world-weary onlooker who’d rather be floating out at sea; the quintessential “noir protagonist in over his own head.” But all this, we think, may serve to stress the supposed lack of empathy in Bastards. It suggests the extent to which the film’s shadowy corporate Paris is of a piece with a chilling effect of the Chicago. As always Clair Denis is consistent in her treatment though often we go out of the orbit with attention torn out. It’s fascinating to watch a filmmaker so sensitive to the expressive potential of faces, bodies, and surfaces working in a genre that denies its characters the freedom to show what they’re feeling or have designs in mind. But the surfaces, for the first time in any recent Denis film, remain surfaces: closed off, silent and, tight-lipped. The crudely shot video footage that gives Bastards its final twist is the piece of evidence the rest of the film has been apprehensively circling to reach no where. It’s shot, after all, in Denis’s unmistakable roving handheld contraption, and from that footage we might infer that there’s still one more bastard to account for in the film’s lineup of victims. If Clair Denis, one doubts, hits the bulls eye or not remains an enigma.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:38:59 +0000
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