Review: The Intruder

If Claire Denis wants to make films that push character and linear plot to the side and focus on something else, then she's welcome to it, but she can't have her cake and eat it too. The Intruder is a film that has a plot - one that is selfishly hidden from the viewer. I think the story is about a man who commits a murder, leaves the country, and spends his time on the run trying to track down a long lost son, all while recovering from a heart transplant. But I couldn't tell you who the murder victim was or whether or not we ever meet the son. By the end of the film key characters have come and gone without ever being clearly introduced, confusing dream sequences have been pigtailed together with the real story as well as shots from other French films, and the main character has spoken less than five or six pages of dialogue. All of these demerits could be praise, of course, if the imagery of the film told a story of its own or spoke to us in a unique language. But if that's what it's doing, then I just don't speak the language.

 
The first scene misleads us by sizing up the film as a thriller. A female customs agent approaches a car at a lonely French border crossing and orders a man out so that her dog can sniff. It's easy to see how such a scene, tight-chested with the potential for bloodshed, could plunge us directly into a story about a heart transplant. But no, it's just a routine crossing. We follow the customs agent back to her home, where the focal point changes to her husband, who walks up behind her and asks her to sit down on his "branch." Then the focus changes again to the husband's father, a 60-ish French epicurean who rolls around naked with his two dogs in a woodsy paradise surrounding his cabin near the Swiss border. We also see him biking and having sex with a younger woman, so that we'll be sure to absorb the fact that this is a man with youthful vigor. He clutches his chest frequently and apparently suffers a mild heart attack at one point, hastening his decision to seek out a newer model.

Throughout these introductory events, director Denis has been dropping in a few shots of criminal types stalking the area around the woods, although what they are up to is not clear. Before you know it, one of them is stabbed and disposed of in a series of close-ups, and then we witness the main character abandoning his dogs to death by driving them out to the middle of nowhere and leaving them. What a jerk. After that, he's off on a globe-trotting mission that will take him to Switzerland, South Korea and Tahiti. Is he on the run to escape charges for murdering one of the miscreants who were skulking around his cabin? I think so. Is he also scouring the globe for a replacement heart? It seems that way, although I've heard that France has excellent medical care. Why is he being stalked by the Russian woman who may or may not have sold him his black-market heart? That's a good question.

Once it becomes clear that a film is not going to play straight with its story, a heavy burden falls on the director to make it otherwise worthwhile. Although this director's work is largely unseen by me, I've been made to understand that creating tactile impressions are more important to her than telling a neat story. The Intruder does not meet that demand of wrapping us up in its visual statement. There are a few promising dream images near the beginning, including one in which a dog scarfs a human heart that is sitting on the ice and one in which horses drag someone through the snow, but the rest of the imagery is pedestrian. Watch out for an unmoving, unbroken shot of the ocean that I clocked at around four minutes. Even the actors are not much to look at. The main character is played by Michel Subor, who has a bit of Philip Seymour Hoffman crag and working-man paunch in him, but none of the character. For much of the last half of the film he lies prostrate in bed after a setback with his new heart and says almost nothing.

There's some welcome comedy before the end, when an entire village of Tahitians get together to hire an actor to play Louis' long lost son, since his real one has gone unfound and they feel bad for him. They line up a number of Asian candidates and denounce them all in turn for not looking enough like Louis to pass for his son. By this point we're happy just to be able to follow the action of an entire scene from start to finish without having to reference notes for clues as to what we're watching. After that scene is over, things start to get goofy again. At the moment, I feel such annoyance at this film that I would happily give away the ending. Unfortunately, I didn't understand that part either, so you're safe.