Often described as Claire Denis’ most inscrutable movie, The Intruder is nonetheless of a piece with her other work, structured on symbolic and imagistic lines rather than firm narrative ones. Opening at the French/Swiss border, it quickly establishes a set of key visual motifs, many of them centered around opposing-yet-entwined themes of guardianship and restriction. These motifs drive the action, which embraces a sort of vaporous dream logic as the story jumps settings, at times fringing upon fantasy or fable. It’s an approach that does indeed represent the director at her most elusive and elliptical, but also one that’s far from inaccessible. Focused intently on the boundaries people draw around themselves, the film formulates a chimeric disquisition on the things that divide us – the self-imposed limitations and expectations cultivated by fear and ignorance – which result in their own form of emotional confinement.
Key to this is the distinction between artificial societal restrictions and deeper human dictates, with the idea of artificially imposed borders clashing with the demands of a more gratifying, honest form of humanism. In this sense, the main character can also be understood as the story’s central malign force, rather than its protagonist. Louis Trebor (the recently deceased Michel Subor) is a gruff loner living a remote lifestyle in the Jura Mountains, which throughout the film’s events are cloaked in a dense layer of snow. At first accompanied by his faithful dogs, he soon abandons the animals and his home, following an episode involving the (possibly imagined) killing of a border-hopping refugee, and his own mounting health issues. In a less than subtle touch, Trebor is suffering from a life-threatening heart problem, a condition which further underscores the callous disregard he possesses for others.
An additional sign of this emotional blockage is his ability to communicate seemingly only through the medium of hard cash. He does this by abruptly paying off his estranged son Sidney (Grégoire Colin), before decamping to South Korea in search of a black-market coronary transplant. The transition from one exchange to another is significant, as each new act in the film’s structure is marked by a definitive transaction. For the last, Trebor follows in the footsteps of Gaugin, traveling by boat to Tahiti. Here he seeks to reconnect with the illegitimate son he fathered decades before, although mostly in order to make amends by passing on more of his money.
As these schematic transitions show, The Intruder is not seen as confusing because of its subtlety. Instead, the perceived difficulty rests in the way it defies narrative convention, refuses to establish a clear boundary between what’s real and what’s imagined, and utilizes those abstract moments as both a surrealistic undercurrent and a digressive extension of the plot itself. Despite his general dominance over other characters, Trebor is plagued by visions that imagine him as a victim, a persecution complex which does in fact have some credible foundation. We know that his body is betraying him, and that his condition has worsened enough to drive him from his home, even if the situation in which he imagines himself leaving is not entirely rooted in reality.
To understand the character’s place in the story is to accept that things can be one thing and another at the same time, a fluid state of existence which defines the film’s slippery method of defying the sanctity of solid borders. Trebor is both violator and victim, an avatar of a certain brand of crusty Gallic paternalism, who nonetheless gets turned into a dupe once he reaches Tahiti. Here the local elders decide to set him up with a fake son and share the proceeds, once it becomes clear that the real one is nowhere to be found. Yet it’s hard to feel bad for him, even with indications that his heart transplant may have been botched. As in much of Denis’ work, masculinity is envisioned as a disruptive force, with the negative effects of such disruptions rarely failing to echo back upon the aggressor.
Paired with the focus on borders, this criticism is easily extended to one of the French nation as a whole. Hanging over the film’s entire third act is Tahiti’s lingering colonial status, to this day granted only limited autonomy as a so-called “overseas country” still partially administered by its one-time overlords. This reality helps transform a potential island reverie into a bit of anticolonial payback, albeit one that does little to change the overall state of things. While the looming death of one bad man brings benefits to most of the characters who’ve come in contact with him, it also does nothing to amend the evils and inequities that solidified his position in the first place.
Deepening the above qualities is the fact that The Intruder cites an essay of the same name, written by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, as its primary inspiration. Yet what results is not an adaptation but a tangent jumping off from that short work’s main themes. In his piece, Nancy reflects on his own heart transplant, describing the burdening strangeness of integrating another person’s life-giving organ into your existing sense of self. Trebor, on the other hand, functions as the dark mirror to Nancy’s self-analysis, accepting the gift without any thought to the giver, capable of knee-jerk fiscal responses to guilt, but no deeper form of self-analysis. Yet for all this he remains the film’s only core character, a virulent presence that the audience is not encouraged to empathize with, yet whose continuing existence also cannot be denied.
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