The Wily Filipino

Claire Denis' "The Intruder."

When the film festival programmer herself introduces the film as "frustrating" and "resists interpretation," well, consider yourself warned. And while I usually relish a fun mindbender of a film, there's little pleasure (at least right now) to be derived from this exercise, especially since one is teased -- constantly -- with the possibility that some form of coherence is just a few minutes away, just another plot twist around the corner. (The images are indeed beautiful -- the wintry French landscape, the colored ribbons at the christening of a Korean ship, the purple sky behind Tahitian coconut trees -- and so is the music, by Stuart Staples from the Tindersticks.)

We follow the travels of Michel Subor, the recipient of a seemingly illegal heart transplant, from France to Korea to Tahiti, where he is, ostensibly, looking for his son. Or something like that. He may be a retired secret agent. Or not. Throughout there are quick intimations of violence, as if the film is threatening to become a spy flick. (I think the nods to the thriller genre were what threw me off; had it been a film about, for instance, a grieving couple wandering the streets of Hiroshima, I would have been more receptive to the cinematic logic.)

But one by one, the little plot threads are dropped: the foreign passports, the heart in the snow, money from a Swiss bank, the Russian agent following him. It is as if what passes for narrative convention is slowly stripped off, layer by layer, until we are left with nothing but the ocean (perhaps as much a symbol of eternal longing here as it is in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). (There is a semblance of circularity toward the end -- I can't spoil it -- but logically, at least in terms of physical logic, it makes little sense.)

Maybe some dreamwork tonight will help me figure it out, but for now... I am indeed frustrated, as the festival programmer rightly predicted. Especially frustrated, since there was a Puffy Amiyumi concert just next door.

Posted by the wily filipino at April 28, 2005 12:21 AM