The Intruder (2004)

L'Intrus, France, 119 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Jean-Luc Nancy

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Stuart Staples

Editor: Nelly Quettier

Cast: Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin, Yekaterina Golubeva, Beatrice Dalle, Florence Loiret Caille, Alex Descas, Bambou, Lolita Chammah

Not surprisingly, perhaps, director and cowriter Claire Denis likely intends many different things by the title of this ponderous and obscure but enrapturingly beautiful picture. Based on an essay by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it’s the story of a one-time mercenary, Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), in search of literally a new heart and thereby somehow his long-estranged son. The heart is thus an intrusion into his body, he wants desperately to intrude on his son’s life, and the movie itself is an intrusion into the essay (which I don’t know). Early in the show, living in a cabin on an isolated mountain of the western Alps, Louis kills and disposes of the body of a random nighttime intruder into his cabin. So on so forth. The knife is an intrusion on that body. Scraping electric guitar music by Tindersticks principal Stuart Staples.

In fact, thinking of it some more, the title can be taken as an intrusion into cinema history. It’s stupefyingly generic. There are other movies or TV miniseries called The Intruder from 1933, 1953, 1962, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. The most famous might be the 1962, directed by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner, Frank Maxwell, and Beverly Lunsford. The 2019 horror show gets pride of place in the IMDb search returns. I’m not saying all these intrusions are conscious on Denis’s part, especially not the other pictures. But I bet a bunch of them are. It’s just the way she rolls.

35 Shots of Rum (2008)

35 rhums, France / Germany, 100 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Tindersticks

Editor: Guy Lecorne

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly

I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.

Beau travail (1999)

France, 92 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Herman Melville

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Charles Henri de Pierrefeu, Eran Zur, Tarkan, Neil Young, Corona

Editor: Nelly Quettier

Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin, Richard Courcet

It occurred to me, puzzling once again over this strange little picture and conventional critical wisdom, that Beau travail is likely a key exhibit by those arguing for 1999 as the greatest single year in film history. A Washington Post piece from a few years ago assessed the case for 2018 and listed other candidates as 1939, 1946, 1955, 1974, 1982, 1999, and 2007. There has to be one for every decade, see, yet somehow, breaking the self-evident rule (I want to put 1948 in the mix), they skipped the 1959-1962 period, possibly splitting votes across 1959, 1960, and 1962. For my part, I know I wouldn't put 1999 anywhere near the top of that list. I would probably go with 1946 or maybe 2007 myself and the only reason I flatly don't think 1999 is the weakest is because 1955 somehow found its way in and I don't know.

I also don't know about director and cowriter Claire Denis, frankly. I loved White Material (2009), had a pretty good time with 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and still want to look again at Chocolat (1988) as I remember liking it quite well at the time it came out (note: it is absolutely not to be confused with the 2000 Chocolat, an entirely different movie). More often Denis's physically liquid yet emotionally brittle style is something I have to fight against. I left High Life (2018) early because I just wasn't in the mood. I was indifferent to Friday Night (2002) and Nenette and Boni (1996). And I thought her vampire movie, Trouble Every Day (2001), was wrongheaded and ineffective (which is also where I thought High Life was headed). That brings us finally to Beau travail, at #115 her highest-ranked picture on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (her only other picture presently on that list is The Intruder from 2004, at #823, which I haven't seen).

White Material (2009)

France/Cameroon, 106 minutes
Director: Claire Denis
Writers: Claire Denis, Marie N'Diaye, Lucie Borleteau
Photography: Yves Cape
Music: Tindersticks
Editor: Guy Lecorne
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, William Nadylam, Michel Subor, Isaach De Bankole, Adele Ado, Ali Barkai

The premise for White Material risks easy political cliché-mongering but director/writer Claire Denis uses her concrete, allusive filmmaking to abstract and refine it until finally it begins to transmute into something very like a horror film. Its first image is jackals running across a dirt road at night, lit by the headlights of a moving vehicle, and soon after the scene is a dark bedroom in a great house, still at night, where a mysterious corpse is found, "the Boxer" according to the soldiers who discover him, caught in the probing stab of a flashlight beam. The soldiers are silent, ranged against the walls. The bedroom is filled with them.

It's the end days of the last vestiges of colonial control in an unnamed African nation. A civil war is underway and approaching its flash point, with mountain-based revolutionaries and nationalized armed forces pitted against one another and the wealthy landowners of French extraction caught between. For all intents and purposes the action in White Material takes place in the psychic span after Captain Willard's encounter with the French-Vietnamese plantation owners of Apocalypse Now Redux. The situation has grown beyond dire. The clashes have become grimly purposeful. Corpses line the roads and trails, arranged in rows with their faces to the ground. It is not a good time to have blue eyes in that country, one character tells another.