Les Salauds (2013)
Directed by Claire Denis

Film Review

After a hiatus of five years, Claire Denis finally managed to get herself back into the director's seat, orchestrating what has been widely perceived as her most baffling film yet.  Les Salauds is Denis's first excursion into film noir territory, an unremittingly bleak revenge thriller whose main influences include Akira Kurosawa's 1960 film The Bad Sleep Well (which was itself inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet) and William Faulner's controversial 1931 novel Sanctuary.  Given the flack that her incendiary cannibal-themed shocker Trouble Every Day (2001) drew, you'd have thought Denis would have had her fill of genre films and instead be minded to stick to what she does best, making realist dramas for sophisticated art house audiences.  But no, Denis takes on that most familiar of all French genres, the classic polar, and gives it her own inimitable makeover, assisted by her faithful screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau and internationally acclaimed cinematographer Agnès Godard.

As its pretty blatant title implies, Les Salauds (a.k.a. The Bastards) is not a film to mince its words.  It is a violent, viscerally harsh piece that remorselessly draws us into a dark place in which the worst aspects of human experience (vengeance, deceit, lust, etc) run rampant.  Whilst it is easy to admire the consummate daring and flair that Denis shows in her mise-en-scène, it is very difficult to engage with the film at anything more than a superficial level.  The slick stylisation that Denis crafts so elegantly can barely sustain the thin, hackneyed plot, which is rendered virtually indecipherable by the most torturously elliptical of narrative structures.  When, in the final act, the pieces in this chaotic jigsaw are finally brought together, you can't help feeling more than a little short-changed.  "Tout ça pour ça..." you hear yourself saying as you count the minutes that have been stolen from you.

Without a strong principal cast to hold all this precious artistry altogether, Les Salauds would have been a challenge for even the most dedicated of Claire Denis fans.  Fortunately, the magnificent Vincent Lindon is on hand, admirably well-chosen to carry the film as the deeply flawed central protagonist.  The intensity and humanity of Lindon's portrayal energies the film and provides something tangible for the spectator to latch onto - without this, the film would be virtually unwatchable, a futile exercise in style for its own sake.  A darkly sensual Chiara Mastroianni provides the perfect complement to Lindon's introspective performance, with a stunning Lola Creton bringing a further burst of sex appeal in a film that badly needs it to counteract the unremitting gloom.   Just don't expect many laughs.

The first of Claire Denis's film to be shot with a digital camera, Les Salauds has a starkly different feel to all of her previous work, a style that is well-suited to convey the coldness and severity of the world in which the drama is set, a world that has lost any sense of decency, comfort and moral awareness.  The eerily atmospheric music (provided by Tindersticks, the British indie band that has worked with Denis on all of her films since the mid 1990s) adds to the film's haunting sense of unreality, reinforcing the impression that this isn't so much a piece of cinema as a fragmented nightmare vision struggling to coalesce into a shadow of reality.  Les Salauds may not be the most comfortable film to watch, but it does have a strangely mesmerising quality, alluring and repellent in equal measure - alas far too vague and self-conscious to be considered a major work.

Film Synopsis

Marco Silvestri, the commander aboard a super-tanker, must make an emergency return to Paris so that he can leave his ship.  His sister Sandra is at her wit's end.  Her husband has just committed suicide, a company has gone bust, and her only daughter has gone off the rails.  Sandra knows who is to blame for all this misfortune: a businessman named Edouard Laporte.  Marco takes an apartment in the building where Laporte has lodged his mistress and their son, but he is unaware that Sandra has secrets of her own which are about to confuse the situation...