Bastards (Les salauds) – Film Review

Vincent Lindon stars as supertanker captain Marco Silvestri, who is called back urgently to Paris, where his sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) is desperate. Her husband has committed suicide, the family business has gone under and her daughter is spiralling downwards.

Sandra holds powerful businessman Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor) responsible, so Marco moves into the building where Laporte has installed his mistress Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni) and her son, though he hasn’t planned for Sandra’s secrets…

I wanted to admire Bastards and to some extent did, but co-writer/director Claire Denis’s film noir is an airlessly claustrophobic, alienating, over-challenging experience. I wanted to turn away or drift off just when I knew I had to pay most attention. There is no linear narrative or obvious plot to help you through the film’s labyrinth, though you might be able to work it out after a couple of viewings.

I guess the plot isn’t the point, though, the point only lies in the arty fashion of telling it. There’s no acting to hold on to, for people like me who admire performances, since the actors are just moving about like emotionless marionettes, just as asked, I imagine.

Denis flamboyantly shows why she’s a highly imaginative film artist, and the work of cinematographer Agnès Godard and composer Stuart Staples is outstanding, so it really looks and sounds special. While the rest of us close it off, some may find it a mesmerising experience.

But the film requires a degree of commitment and surrender to its dark, austere, weird world and weirder ways that I didn’t feel I wanted to give it. My interest and heart just weren’t in it and I was glad to be free of it in clean, fresh, cold air of the street afterwards.

Denis is the director of the brilliant Beau Travail (1999) and Nenette and Boni (1996).

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com