Review: Bastards

Image courtesy of Sundance Selects.

Claire Denis is one of the world's great filmmakers, but she seems to have fallen into a pattern of delivering a great movie or two and then following them with a frustratingly opaque and fragmented one.

For example, she followed the marvelous "Beau Travail" and underrated "Trouble Every Day" with the murky "L'Intrus," which many loved but is among my least favorite of her works. And now, she gives us "Bastards," which follows the elegiac "35 Shots of Rum" and the starkly haunting "White Material."

Those familiar with my taste should know I certainly do not object to the peculiar, the experimental, the occasionally outright nonsensical or what some might refer to as challenging cinema. But Denis' latest is so vague that it's hard to even collect my thoughts on it.

The picture has something to do with a tanker captain named Marco (Vincent London, who might have played a great 1960s Jean Pierre Melville anti-hero) returning home to visit his sister (Julie Bataille), whose husband has died and teenage daughter (Lola Creton) has attempted suicide due to what a doctor describes as severe sexual abuse. When we first meet the young woman, she is walking nude along a deserted Paris street with blood dripping down her leg.

Marco's sister blames her husband's death on a business partner (Michael Subor). Before long, our hero gets entangled with the business partner's wife (Chiara Mastroianni), who has a young boy.

The film looks great, but - as the saying goes - has less filling. Marco goes further and further down a rabbit hole, but it's unclear what he's searching for and even what he finds.

"Bastards" has a throbbing electronica score and some moody sequences that feel as if they were pulled straight out of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" or Olivier Assayas's "Demonlover." But it's a case of - to borrow another cliche - being all dolled up with nowhere to go.

Denis is a wonderful filmmaker with a style and mood all her own. But "Bastards" is a bit too spare to leave much of an impression. Here's to hoping that, in typical fashion, her next few works are great.