First appearing as Commander Forestier in 1999’s Beau Travail, veteran actor Michel Subor quickly carved out a niche within Claire Denis’ filmography, an oeuvre in which familiar faces often pop up again and again. This company-style casting involves a select group of specialists repeatedly embodying specific types, usually in ancillary but significant roles: Alex Descas as the steady voice of reason, Isaach de Bankolé as the alluring firebrand, Grégoire Colin as the two-sided face of traditional masculinity searching for a different means of expression. Alongside these regulars, Subor fell into place as a kind of stock villain, inhabiting a menacing figure of sclerotic French paternalism across four fascinating films.
The last of these is Bastards, a sordid distillation of class warfare, monied perversion and sexual violence that stands out as one of the director’s darkest works, both in tone and visual presentation. Shooting in digital for the first time, Denis plumbs the stygian depths of the Parisian underworld, crafting a squalid portrait of the city that opts for flat naturalism during the day, and pure hideousness in its nocturnal scenes. Casting together a blur of sodium yellows, corroded golds and deep blacks, she continues her project of vitiating the built-in romantic mystique of one of Europe’s most over-filmed cities.
The story centers around Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon), a commercial ship captain who returns to land after the suicide of his brother-in-law Jacques, also his one-time best friend. Saddled with unpayable debts, the man’s demise is somehow linked to a criminal incident involving Jacques’ daughter (Marco’s niece), who remains hospitalized, conscious but refusing to speak. Like a Film Noir protagonist, Marco camps out in the apartment adjacent to that of Edouard Laporte (Subor), a shady business tycoon with a sideline in high-interest, under-the-table loans. In keeping with these Noir trappings, the depiction of Marco is ambivalent, as the gruff man sets out upon a grumbling program of investigation and revenge that involves seducing Laporte’s wife Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), repeatedly losing his temper at his sister, and glowering intensely at everyone else, with a few breaks for tooling around the city in his vintage car.
A film so focused on the claustrophobic gloom of urban life could never be called a Western, but Denis brings the genre into the conversation, utilizing one of its most common narrative tropes. A mysterious man rolls into town, tasked with reasserting the moral order, an assignment that will involve an inevitable showdown with the shady boss whose reign has encouraged corruption to displace decency. Partially based on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Bastards in some ways functions as Denis’ version of The Searchers, as a man’s quest to restore family integrity and feminine virtue eventually reveals more about his own motivations than that of the woman he’s attempting to rescue. Subverting both Noir and Western conventions, it achieves a sort of synchronicity by playing the qualities of both off of each other, making for a composite portrait in which dueling visions of flawed masculinity, contained within the same character, square off against one another.
As a counterweight, Subor’s character stands out as a pure figure of privileged malevolence, whose aggression is entirely implicit, requiring no posturing to exert the force that lies beneath its polished exterior. Lindon counters him as the brutish antithesis, intensity vivified into human form, rather than sublimated through genteel mechanisms of power. Looking like a sculpture hewn from marble but left partially unfinished, his obstreperous demeanor transitions from a sign of hulking mastery to one of impotency as the film progresses. A conflict between he and Laporte seems promised, with the possibility held out that his overwhelming brawn may win out against the older man’s diminished physique. In fact, in a final instance of subversion, the clash does not occur as promised, instead masterfully redirected through the various channels of influence that emanate off of both men, blowing back on one while the other avoids the contest entirely.
As is common in Denis’ oeuvre, there’s as much plot found around the fringes as at the center, with a commensurate focus on the women caught up in this chest-beating conflict. The niece Justine (Lola Créton), despite barely speaking, finds a more direct route to Marco’s goals than the man himself is capable of. Significantly, she destroys herself in the process, maintaining the abject blackness of the narrative, in which no forward progress can be made without some devastating outcome to match it. In the end, nothing about the existing power structure is changed, and the true circumstances of the tragedy that kicks off the story are revealed, in a chilling final scene that breaks through into the realm of overt horror. Here, a formerly smooth, dreary palette is abandoned in favor of blown-out colors and visible grain, the low-light setting pushing the digital medium to its limits, as the film unveils nightmares almost too terrible to contemplate.
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