Essay

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By José teodoro

Emotional logic prevails in Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, inviting us to share its itinerant protagonist’s unmoored state.

L’Intrus is playing now at 7 Ludlow and streaming on Metrograph At Home.

L’Intrus

Traversing borders national, corporeal, psychic, and meta-cinematic, Claire Denis’s L’Intrus (2004) is a mesmerizing narrative essay on trespass and maladaptation. A man’s chest is breached so as to assimilate the heart of another. Figures emerge and then disappear into ellipses. Acts of violence transpire in a crepuscular flash. Anxiogenic dreams besiege both the protagonist and the narrative flow, as do fleeting glimpses of another film altogether. Seemingly rudderless, L’Intrus‘s sinuous drift is precisely guided by a probing fascination with character and theme, never entirely relinquishing its grasp on the thread of some internal causality, however obscure. So much more incisive with regard to the grit of globalized trade, postcolonial residue, and displacement than any number of subsequent network narratives determined to comment on the same issues, the film’s relevance has only expanded in the years since its release. L’Intrus does not ingratiate or explain; it beguiles and immerses.

Written by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, the scenarist with whom the director has collaborated routinely since her feature directorial debut, Chocolat (1988), L’Intrus is a response to, rather than an adaptation of, Jean-Luc Nancy’s 2000 essay of the same name, which describes the eerie alienation the philosopher felt toward his own body in the wake of a heart transplant. The film’s protagonist, Louis, captivatingly embodied by Denis regular Michel Subor, seems to bear no particular resemblance to Nancy, sharing only his organic predicament. Louis resides with a pair of dogs in a cabin in France’s Jura Mountains. Aging-Subor was 69 at the time of filming-but otherwise robust, Louis suffers a cardiac arrest, prompting him to set about acquiring a new heart on the international black market. His journey takes him to Switzerland, Korea, and, later, Tahiti, where he plans to live out his remaining days and where, in the throes of some postoperative spell of paternal/colonial sentimentality, he seeks the son he sired during some dalliance decades prior and to whom he’s now determined to leave his fortune. The source of Louis’s wealth is never stated, but in the schema of L’Intrus, his entitlement is at least partly tethered to geography: Louis is the epitome of the ostensibly benevolent, affluent north, imposing its patronage upon the global south while ferociously guarding itself against that same unruly hemisphere’s territorial incursions. Louis wants a young man’s heart, not that of an old man or a woman of any age. “I want to keep my character,” he says, casually echoing the sentiment of every xenophobe fretting over their national boundaries being traversed by those of divergent color, creed, class, or, most especially, the desperately disenfranchised, such as the refugees seen scurrying across dirt roads under headlights (an image that anticipates the wild dogs in the opening aria of Denis’s White Material, 2009).

Seemingly rudderless, L’Intrus‘s sinuous drift is precisely guided by a probing fascination with character and theme, never entirely relinquishing its grasp on the thread of some internal causality, however obscure.

In giving up his life in France for a new one in Tahiti, Louis’s trajectory inevitably invokes that of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin a century earlier. The title of Gauguin’s most famous work from his Tahitian period, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, would make a perfectly apt subtitle to L’Intrus, which is still widely regarded, somewhat misleadingly, as Denis’s most evasive, baffling work. While serving as its anchor, Louis’s story is far from the only one occupying the film’s sprawling tapestry. There is Antoinette (Florence Loiret-Caille, of Denis’s Friday Night, 2002), the customs agent and life partner to stay-at-home dad Sidney (another Denis regular, Grégoire Colin), who playfully appropriates her professional queries-“Do you have anything to declare?”-for the purposes of erotic foreplay. We will eventually learn that Sidney is Louis’s European son, though their relations are frosty and their interactions limited to the occasional fatherly handout. There is an unnamed dog breeder played by Béatrice Dalle, fresh off Denis’s blood-spattered Trouble Every Day (2001), looking very on-brand tossing heavy slabs of raw meat to her dogs while revealing ample cleavage. There is a priest, in a particularly enigmatic cameo by Alex Descas, veteran of eight Denis features and at least three shorts to date. And there is the character identified only as the young Russian woman, played by the late Katia Golubeva, central to Denis’s I Can’t Sleep (1994). In a vestibule-like opening scene that seems to fall outside the diegesis, hers is the first voice we hear, intoning, “Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in your heart.” This character is at once pivotal and peripheral, elusive and immensely consequential, the procurer of Louis’s heart. She is also, perhaps, his conscience. Perhaps his nemesis.

Documents are burned. A ship is christened. A room is painted. Characters share only the briefest of exchanges, expository dialogue being anathema to Denis’s narrative style. Someone is knifed to death, but the slaying is conveyed so quickly and efficiently, without passion, only half-visible in the nocturnal exterior, that it may as well have never happened-until we see the corpse being wrapped in tarpaulin and turn up much later, though even then its identity is barely alluded to. Certain sequences are discernable as dreams by their asynchronous events and their clean, bright, snowy locales, such frigidity being the opposite of the tropical paradise Louis comes to covet. Having said that, there is a major incident in the film’s final act that’s so brutal and mythopoetic that, despite its paucity of telltale wintry environs, I also interpret it as dream. Dreams, too, are intrusions. Indeed, all of these sequences feed a larger thematic investigation. Denis’s films teach you how to watch them very gradually, and the more times you watch L’Intrus, the more you begin to realize that, rather than accrue inscrutability, nearly every passage seems freighted with meaning, right down to the most minute detail. Some of these are almost comical, even punny, in their allusiveness. Take the scene where, suffering his heart attack while swimming in the lake near his cabin, Louis scrambles to shore, grabs fistfuls of gummy gray sand, and unearths that unmistakable symbol of cardiac abuse: a cigarette butt. Later, while in Geneva to access his assets, there is a substantial sequence in which Louis goes shopping for a new watch: it would appear that our protagonist is seeking not one but two kinds of ticker.

The singularity of Denis’s cinema emerges, in part, from her willingness to simultaneously embrace the cryptic and the sensual, to be withholding with regard to orientation or the establishment of a given status quo, while being profoundly generous in her attention to bodies, movement, breath, elements, atmospheres, heat: transmitters of desire. The camerawork in L’Intrus-courtesy of the great Agnès Godard, cinematographer on nearly all Denis’s films-itself subtly underlines their cinema’s capacity for intrusion, adhering to no obvious subjective perspective, yet employing vaguely voyeuristic views of characters through windows and thresholds. (For evidence of Denis’s continued will to intrude, look no further than a memorable view of the inside of Juliette Binoche’s body in High Life, 2018.) The Denis-Godard gaze is always drawn to patterns in motion: a scene that finds Louis in bed with his pharmacist lover (Bambou) luxuriates in the rhyming constellations of moles on Subor’s back and Bambou’s visage. Later, Louis’s fresh chest scar, gnarled like the surface of a topographical map, encapsulates the kind of liminal space that all of L’Intrus inhabits, like the woodsy wilderness where France meets Switzerland or the undulating Polynesian shores where turquoise sea meets sandy beach. Denis’s cinema may be at times mystifying, but it is anything but severe. Her use of images to render surfaces nearly palpable is matched by her equally sensuous use of non-diegetic music, which in L’Intrus, as usual in Denis, is furnished by Tindersticks frontman Stuart A. Staples in mesmerizing synth drones interrupted by blunt, reverb-heavy shards of electric guitar, like lightning slowed down, a sonic patina eventually accentuated by tumbling drums, bass, and trumpet.

Near the end of L’Intrus, which pivots between its ongoing close-third-person identification with Louis and a darkly comical depiction of Tahitian villagers auditioning local men to play the role of Louis’s errant son, there are brief, uncontextualized, strangely affecting interjections from Paul Gégauff’s 1965 film Le Reflux, in which we see a much younger Subor, presumably the same age as Louis when he would have fathered his Tahitian son, in what passes, more or less, for the same South Seas setting. These insertions serve as an ingenious flashback device, a petit hommage to both Gégauff’s film and Subor’s youthful beauty, and an extension of a strategy unique to Denis’s use of Subor, whose character in Beau travail was developed as a kind of continuation of his character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit soldat (1963). While in no way denigrating his talents, Denis has said that she likes to cast Subor not as an actor but, rather, as a person. His subsequent, overtly sinister appearances in White Material and Bastards (2013) indeed feel talismanic, intrusions that signal the presence of some restless, nearly revenant-like apparition-figure that might turn up anywhere. Which makes me think of “Where? What? Where?,” Geoff Dyer’s semi-fictional essay chronicling a disappointment-laden journey to Tahiti, which concludes with the British writer’s response to the titular query in the aforementioned Gauguin painting: “We are here to go somewhere else.” It’s a sentiment in concert with this haunting film’s coda. The intruder, indeed, is always on the move. Perhaps we’re destined to become intruders the moment we leave the house.

José Teodoro is a freelance critic and playwright.