Bastards (2013)
Directed by Claire Denis
Marco returns to Paris after his brother-in-law's suicide, where he targets the man his sister believes caused the tragedy – though he is ill-prepared for her secrets as they quickly muddy the waters.
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9 films that influenced Bastards
What critics say influenced Bastards
If the title Force Of Evil hadn’t already been taken by Abraham Polonsky’s great 1948 tale of brothers hung up in the numbers racket, it would apply to Claire Denis’ noir-inflected Bastards, though the pluralization pointedly spreads the blame around.
But Denis’ atmospherics, as usual, carry the day: Noir is a game of hard shadows and hard cases, but Denis (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and her team of regular collaborators—cinematographer Agnès Godard, many of the actors, and Tindersticks, who contribute an essential mood-building score—approach it with a seductive delicacy that’s both fitting for the genre and distinct from it.
Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
You can love films by Claire Denis – “Beau Travail” – or hate them – “Trouble Every Day” – or you can feel somewhere in the middle.
Like Denis' sublimely impenetrable The Intruder (2004), the point is to get hopelessly lost in the film's eerie, unsettling flow.
These two incidents are linked and Naval Captain Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon, "La Moustache," "Mademoiselle Chambon") gives up his post to return to Paris and to help his distraught widowed sister Sandra (Julie Bataille, "Paris, je t'aime") and his abused niece Justine (Lola Créton, "Bluebeard," "Something in the Air").
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As the daughter, Justine (Lola Créton, of Goodbye First Love and Something In The Air), recovers from her physical and mental trauma, and her mother, Sandra (Julie Bataille), sinks into despair, help arrives in the musky form of Sandra’s brother Marco (Denis favorite Vincent Lindon), a ship’s captain who cashes out his savings and leaves his old life behind.
But Denis’ atmospherics, as usual, carry the day: Noir is a game of hard shadows and hard cases, but Denis (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and her team of regular collaborators—cinematographer Agnès Godard, many of the actors, and Tindersticks, who contribute an essential mood-building score—approach it with a seductive delicacy that’s both fitting for the genre and distinct from it.
As the daughter, Justine (Lola Créton, of Goodbye First Love and Something In The Air), recovers from her physical and mental trauma, and her mother, Sandra (Julie Bataille), sinks into despair, help arrives in the musky form of Sandra’s brother Marco (Denis favorite Vincent Lindon), a ship’s captain who cashes out his savings and leaves his old life behind.
These two incidents are linked and Naval Captain Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon, "La Moustache," "Mademoiselle Chambon") gives up his post to return to Paris and to help his distraught widowed sister Sandra (Julie Bataille, "Paris, je t'aime") and his abused niece Justine (Lola Créton, "Bluebeard," "Something in the Air").
The difference is that where Bastards finds her impressionistic, hyper-tactile aesthetic willfully hemmed in, Trouble Every Day suggests what happens when it’s allowed to run amok.
Titled from Frank Zappa and shown also at the Museum of the Moving Image/MoMI two weeks earlier, Halloween night screening was Trouble Every Day, by Claire Denis, whose New York Film Festival noir Bastards is like to bring her wider recognition.
It may be the darkest film of Denis’ career—which, after her vampiric shocker Trouble Every Day, is saying something.
You can love films by Claire Denis – “Beau Travail” – or hate them – “Trouble Every Day” – or you can feel somewhere in the middle.
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Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
Cowriter (with Jean-Pol Fargeau)/director Claire Denis ("Beau Travail," "35 Shots of Rum") takes a fragmented approach to an investigation which leads to incest and a horrific sex ring, but although her production is handsomely shot by long time cinematographer Agnès Godard and artfully scored by Tinderbox's Stuart Staples ("White Material") her story shards are so refracted there is no emotional stake to grasp onto.