The Intruder (L'Intrus)

As you would expect from a film based on a book of philosophy rather than a traditional narrative work, Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (The Intruder) is not a straightforward kind of film that lends itself to easy description or understanding. Although perhaps the name of Claire Denis (Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day, Vendredi Soir) should already have alerted the viewer to expect nothing less, as with each passing film Denis has pushed narrative further into the background, aiming towards a more abstract, poetic and purely sensual mode of filmmaking.

L’Intrus is based on a 40-page work by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the subject chosen to consider the theme of ‘L’Etranger’, the alienation of the outsider. Informed by a heart transplant operation he had recently undergone, Nancy considered the implication of another person’s heart in his body and expanded this theme to consider the intrusion of the outsider in a social context. Denis had already worked with the philosopher in her segment of the Ten Minutes Older: The Cello portmanteau movie, in which Nancy himself appears in a train sequence that recalls a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. The work of L’Intrus has also been the starting point for another movie also released in France at the same time as Denis’ film – Nicolas Klotz’s La Blessure (The Wound).

In the opening shots of L’Intrus, we see Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), an old man living in the mountainous Jura region of France, revelling in the pure physicality of basking naked in the woods with his dogs, cycling through the region and making love with a lady who runs a pharmacy in the town (Bambou). Trebor also has a son living in the region – Sidney (Grégoire Colin), who is a father himself and married to a border guard (Florence Loiret-Caille) who is working to keep at bay incursions by illegal immigrants. But Trebor has an ailing heart, an illness which drives him to seek a heart transplant illegally from a mysterious Russian woman (Katia Golubeva) who leads a group of criminals dealing in organs taken from bodies of people they abduct and kill. He travels to Geneva to obtain the money for the transplant from a stash he is holding in a Swiss bank (the undoubtedly illegal earnings from some unspecified activity) and after the operation, haunted by dreams of the Russian woman and fears of his body rejecting the intrusion of another’s heart in his body, he travels to Korea to buy a boat that will take him to the Polynesian Islands to find a son he believes he has there.

The above description makes the film sound relatively straightforward, when in reality it is anything but. There are several themes confronted here of which the idea of intrusion is perhaps the most complicated, following the inspiration of Nancy’s heart-transplant idea and taking it to extremes, pushing the boundaries between real world ideas of intrusion (the customs searches, the illegal immigrants, the prowler around Trebor’s house, the idea that he might be a Russian agent) and psychological variations on the theme (the nightmarish activities of the body organ thieves is more than likely Trebor’s psychological reaction to the intrusive experience his body has undergone).

The film also undertakes a real-life journey from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere as Trebor seek a son he believes he has in Tahiti (the film uses clips of an unfinished film, Le Reflux Michel Subor made there in the 1960’s with Paul Gégauff), but this is also a metaphorical inner journey to come to terms with his role as a father. Since he already has a son in France, the reason for the journey becomes increasingly confused and is perhaps more aligned with his concerns about his failing health, which would account for the reappearance in unusual circumstances of Sidney in the South Pacific at the end of the film. This inverted idea of paradise - of running away from what he has to seek something that may not exist - is also confronted in the contrasts between the sheer physicality and poetic natural beauty of the opening scenes of Trebor’s life in Jura (emphasised also by Béatrice Dalle’s typical feral role as his dog-breeding neighbour, the “Queen of the Northern Hemisphere” who hurtles through the snow with wild abandon on her sleigh) and the rather less attractively photographed Polynesian Islands, where Trebor becomes bogged down in a prosaic search for his son as his health falters.

There is a lot to take in here and try to organise and puzzle over and Denis doesn’t make it easy for the viewer, with elliptical gaps in the narrative, no back story and no clear differentiation between what is real and imagined or between what is literal and what is metaphorical. Anyone seeking a definitive answer to the puzzles and challenges the film presents will undoubtedly be dissatisfied with L’Intrus, which refuses to be pinned down to a single interpretation or consistent tone. The only way to fully enjoy the film is to allow it to take you in its flow, and with the always stunning cinematography of Agnès Godard (making wonderful use of the ‘Scope ratio) the compelling presence of Michel Subor and the appearance of other regular Denis actors, that is certainly a pleasure - but that is not an easy option for anyone who is used to a film express a concrete narrative thread, idea or theme. Nor is it easy to critique such a film in terms of plot, script, acting and directing, so any scoring I make on this particular film is purely arbitrary and always subject to re-evaluation on re-watching – something which always makes Claire Denis’ films endlessly fascinating.

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DVD
The Intruder is released in the UK by Tartan in PAL format on a dual-layer disc. The disc is not region encoded. The film is transferred anamorphically at its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio and the quality of the print is excellent throughout, showing no marks or damage, good colour tones and a reasonably shape image. I noticed a slight flicker of macro-blocking in one or two scenes in the forests of Jura – but the image is mostly stable. The DVD comes with the usual choice of soundtracks – DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0. All are fine, but as usual this is going rather overboard for a film like this, which is almost entirely centre/front based. English subtitles are in white font and are optional.

Extras
The Trailer (1:31) for the film is included. With no dialogue, it relies entirely on the images and the moody, hypnotic score by Stuart Staples of Tindersticks and does capture the tone of the film well. In the Director interview (36:01) Claire Denis talks about the effect of Jean-Luc Nancy’s book upon her and the process it underwent in her translating it to the screen, through her own personal outlook and with her choices of actors. With Denis’ faltering English, the interview is a little bit long, but it is good and reasonably in-depth. Some people might find this essential to make out what the film is at all about.

Overall
With Agnès Godard’s beautiful cinematography, Stuart Staples’ haunting score and Claire Denis’ unique perspective on unusual subject matter L’Intrus is not a particularly difficult film to watch unless you are expecting it all to make sense on some rational level (which I suppose is not an unreasonable expectation to have for a film). L’Intrus however works on another plane entirely, externalising psychological conflicts and emotions, working in a larger, poetic and metaphorical context that probably only fully makes sense to Claire Denis. Considering the importance of imagery and sound in the film, it is pleasing that Tartan have presented the film so well on DVD, additionally providing one substantial extra feature that throws some welcome insight onto the motivations and working methods of a fascinating director.