THE INTRUDER (Claire Denis, 2004)

Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s novel L’Intrus, Claire Denis’s same-titled film includes two of her most moving moments. One shows Sidney Trebor (Grégoire Colin, wonderful), a young father carrying his infant, Louis, in a sling-harness against his heart. Louis looks up at his father’s face. Slowly the child smiles, and we understand, even though Sidney’s face is outside the frame, that the infant is following his father’s lead in expressing love. Sidney’s father, Louis, from whom Sidney is estranged, later buys a heart on the post-Soviet Russian black market as a surgical replacement for his own. After intermediate stops, Louis ends up in Tahiti looking for another son. A village panel indulges Louis’s fantasy of leaving a wad of bills to whomever and conducts interviews to select a fitting “son” for him. (The scene parodies a casting session!) Before he expires (or, given the film’s dream fabric, perhaps when or after), Louis imagines seeing Sidney cold dead in a Tahitian morgue. Sidney’s chest shows the surgical scar that by now has faded from Louis’s own body. How does one enter into the mystery of this moment without dissolving into tears?
     The woman who arranged for Louis’s heart shadows him; perhaps she is his guilty conscience. On a dark street Louis cries out at her to leave him alone. “I have a sick heart!” She shoots back: “Not anymore! Your heart is just empty.”
     Or so full, needing emptying out.
     Denis’s film, strange, elusive, very quiet, dreamlike, begins at the border between France and Switzerland but mostly navigates the border between the love one feels and the love one cannot express. Louis’s journey home in a coffin, the sea rolling underneath an immense gray and charcoal sky (except for a patch of eerie light), catches a remarkable chill.

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GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995)

I have just added the following entry to my 100 Greatest Asian Films List, which you will find in two parts elsewhere on this site.

Three time-lines span more than a half-century of Taiwanese history in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Hao nan hao nu. Liang Ching is an actress playing Chiang Bi-yu in a film-within-the-film titled Hao nan hao nu. Chiang Bi-yu and her husband, Chung Hao-tung, and three others were among Taiwan’s “good men, good women,” who contributed to the mainland Resistance movement against Japanese invaders-occupiers. Ching, through the experience of playing the politically committed Bi-yu (Annie Shizuka Inoh, searing, plays both parts), gropes for a surer sense of herself and her nation’s identity. The actual Bi-yu, hospitalized, also participates in the film, but offscreen, only through Ching, who sadly informs us of Bi-yu’s death prior to the film’s premiere.
     Music or voiceover may slide from a bit of one time-line to a bit of another.
     The film opens in the past. In long-shot the five idealistic young patriots move across a field to join the anti-Japanese cause. The image is monochromatic, like all the images in the film-within-the-film, whose camera remains invisible. The film ends with the same image, but in color, like the other present-day and relatively recent material. The past has been brought to the present that it helped shape. Static camera recording walking (and singing) souls who at the last pass out of the frame: stillness; transience; recollection; loss.
     Ching is haunted by her past as a drug-addicted bar hostess, a gangster’s mistress, his death—a mirroring of Taiwan’s tragic history.
     Postwar, in the 1950s, Bi-yu and other reformers opposed to the continuation of feudalism were arrested; many, including her husband, were executed as Communists. If you have forgotten how evil Chiang Kai-shek was, or the role that the U.S. played in his reign of terror, this film will remind you.
     Rigorous, complex, poignant, haunting.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

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