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High Life
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When Dušan Makavejev, the
great film director from the former Yugoslavia, died in January 2019, I
re-watched his wonderful, scandalous Sweet
Movie (1976) as a gesture of commemoration. The highlight of this film – as
anyone who has seen it will never be able to forget – involves a “radical
lifestyle” commune led by the Viennese artist Otto Muehl, in which its members
liberate themselves from all bodily constraints, hurling food around like
little kids and happily rolling naked in their own faeces. But there’s one
detail I had not remembered: at the end, an Assistant Director credit for one
“Claire Deni” (sic). For that was indeed where Claire Denis began her career
after film school, as an assistant to Makavejev, Jacques Rivette and Wim
Wenders.
That gaffe in the credits was doubtless just a
typographic slip, but a usefully Freudian one. Déni in French means “denial” in the strong, psychoanalytic sense –
a type of repression. There is not much denial in Denis’ own films, including Trouble Every Day (2001) and The Intruder (2004). Or, when there is, it is a sure sign of
disturbance, unresolved conflicts and blocked desires – like in her masterpiece
about a Foreign Legion patrol in Dijbouti, Beau travail (1999). Was
Denis fondly recalling Sweet Movie –
a film dedicated to the overcoming of all inhibitions – when she decided to
stage, early on in High Life, the scene
of a father playfully teaching his baby daughter this intriguing word, “taboo”?
(This is, by the way, the first time that the cosmopolitan Denis has shot a
film entirely in English. Curiously, her first thought, long ago, for the lead
role was Vincent Gallo – prompting memories of his strange spaceman role in
María Lídon’s clunky SF piece Stranded [2001].)
By the way, this Dad and child happen to be floating
in outer space. High Life opens with
the strangest and most beguiling introduction to any “space opera” in cinema: while
Monte (Robert Pattinson) works at fixing a fault on the exterior of the vessel,
he monitors, through an earpiece, little Willow (Scarlett Lindsey) inside. When
the girl cries out sharply, Monte flinches and loses his humble spanner in the
void. This is the closest the film ever comes to the type of deep-space action
familiar from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Gravity (2013).
It takes quite a while for a first-time viewer of High Life to piece together much of what
is happening in its plotline and general situation. That is standard operating
procedure for Denis: chronology is scrambled, and the storytelling
point-of-view is only loosely allied with the subjective perceptions of Monte
as a central character. It has been suggested by Saad Chakali that Denis, with
regular collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau, employs a unique method for elaborating
her scripts: the scattered images come first, and only later the narrative that
is deemed necessary to connect them. The result is full of gaps, leaps, mysteries
and free associations that really make the spectator work to keep up.
Nonetheless, a story – a melodrama, even – does
eventually take hold in High Life. This
odd cube floating in space (Denis patiently explains in interviews that such a
ship would really not need an aerodynamic design) is, in fact, a prison. Its
diverse inhabitants (the cast also includes Mia Goth and rapper André Benjamin)
have been exiled from Planet Earth not only in space but also in time – since, in
one of the film’s most unnerving details, they send back their daily reports to
a “system” that is now far in their intergalactic past, its administrators long
dead. Is there anybody out there?
The central drama springs from the rather sinister
machinations of Dr Dibs (Juliette Binoche, very different here than in Denis’
previous and joyous Un beau soleil
intérieur aka Let the Sunshine In [2017]).
Both captive and captor in one, Dibs administers daily drugs to the crew and
pursues her dark dreams of creating new life. The enigmatic path that takes
Dibs from an energetic, solitary session inside the ship’s handy “fuck box” to
a less-than-consensual nocturnal encounter with Monte is the “red thread” of
this labyrinthine narrative.
High Life is a film that deliberately overturns
expectations on virtually every level. Expectations of genre: this is a SF movie
almost bereft of technological gadgets, with absolutely no aliens in sight, and
precious few glimpses of even stars and planets (the only “cosmic” visions come
courtesy of an inspired collaboration between Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and
French astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau – the latter who works with another of
Denis’ close associates, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy).
Even on the level of its style, High Life is an unusual project for Denis. Her devotees (such as
Saige Walton) like to celebrate her typically lyrical camerawork (here the DOP
is Yorick Le Saux) and her evident obsession with textures of every kind: the materiality of flesh, objects, places.
Yet High Life, despite its images of
an on-board garden reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic Solaris (1972) or of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972), takes a decidedly
minimalistic, even flat route. Once a basic colour scheme and an unostentatious
production design have been established inside the cube, Denis is content to
observe the intimate interactions between the characters, and especially
between Monte and Willow, both as a child and – after a sudden, disconcerting
jump in time – a teenager (Jessie Ross).
Finally, High
Life does not seem – at least on its surface – very much like the
taboo-busting films by Denis that I mentioned at the outset. She has declared
that she intends it as a blow against our current “puritanical epoch” – still
smarting over the attacks she received for Bastards (2013), with its chillingly transgressive exploration of sex and power.
Yet so much of High
Life – a few powerful, confronting scenes aside – seems quiet, cool, calm,
contemplative, not at all provocative. What’s Denis talking about? For once,
the spoiler clause of film reviewing is fully justified: the true theme and
subject of High Life is kept subterranean
throughout and really only peeks out, suggestively and ambiguously, in its
final moments. Jean-Luc Nancy (in “High Truth”, a fascinating piece that
appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, no.
752, February 2019) sees in this matrix a profound
meditation on the notion of human origin. Let’s just say for now: you should
keep an open mind.
MORE Denis: White Material, Friday Night, Chocolat © Adrian Martin March 2019 |
