L’Intrus (2004) - film review

Sixty-something Louis Trebor lives a hermit-like existence in the Jura mountains, his only companions being his two dogs.  He finds it hard to communicate with his estranged son, Sidney, who lives with his own family on the Swiss border.  After a heart transplant, Louis acquires a sudden jolt of wanderlust.  He leaves his native France and heads off to the South Pacific, in search of his lost past...

One of France’s leading avant-garde filmmakers, Claire Denis is becoming more impenetrable with every film she makes.  She followed the supremely distasteful vampire oddity that was Trouble Every Day (2001) with the equally mystifying Vendredi soir (2002), a film that apparently glorifies the one-night stand.  Denis’s next film, L’Intrus trumps both of these in its visual artistry and frustrating lack of cohesion.

As a purely visual experience, L’Intrus is quite remarkable.  The haunting location photography makes this a potent study in solitude and estrangement.  Dreams and reality crossover into one another so that we can never be sure which is which, or indeed if anything we see is real.  The film’s abstract nature allows the spectator to read into it whatever he or she chooses, but loosely speaking the film appears to be about man’s inability to feel at one with the world in which he lives.  He is always an outsider, an intruder in paradise - at least that is one possible interpretation of the film’s title.

This is not an easy film to watch, however.  Its generous two-hour runtime and its complete lack of anything resembling a plot place great strains on the spectator’s patience and concentration.  Despite the beautiful images that award-winning cinematographer Agnès Godard treats us to, L’Intrus feels aimless and ultimately unsatisfying.  It is hard to identify with the film’s leading protagonist (Michel Subor), who is a tad too egoistical and saturnine to be remotely likeable, and the lack of clues as to what the film is about is as off-putting as it is liberating.  You will either love this film or hate it.

© James Travers 2010

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