Disorder

This tense roller-coaster of suspense encapsulates the current international corruption in politics. In the pre-title sequence two lines of charging, hooting soldiers converge on a tufted plain. The ensuing narrative will trace the central soldier’s disintegration — an emblem of the disintegration of our global politics. A broken time breaks its defenders — and requires broken men to save it.  

Hero Vincent is initially shot in intense close-up, which with the throbbing soundtrack suggests the wounded man’s heightened sensitivity. His visit to a crippled veterans’ rehab centre provides physical equivalents to his mental damage. There he buys blackmarket drugs, a dangerous alternative to the psychological help he refuses 

The political backdrop coheres with Vincent’s presentation as — from his tattoo — a figure of Chaos and the global disorder evoked by the title. The Lebanese mogul is an international arms dealer, himself a figure of chaos and political disorder, feeding the violence which ultimately creeps from the Middle East into his luxurious French estate. The posh party Vincent is hired to guard ripples with sinister disorder, from the belligerent unlisted visitor to the suspicious negotiations in the back rooms and rolling lawns. The ominous scheming undercuts the bucolic atmosphere of the estate’s name, Maryland.

Vincent’s eagerness to return to the war in Afghanistan shows him crippled not just by the violence of war but by his addiction to it. While friend Dennis explains that Vincent’s head is still in the battlefield, his anxiety makes him a questionable but effective “security guard.” The term is paradoxical for a man of such violence, paranoia and danger. When he appears to have over-reacted to the car possibly following Vincent and his charges to the seashore, his paranoia is justified by the violent attack upon them later. 

The arms-dealer’s family are a telling extension. Little Ali is the privileged son whose parents refrain from denying anything or disciplining him. The German Jessie begins as  the standard issue blonde trophy wife, but softens when she leaves the party to feed the dog. Though Vincent is initially hired to secure them for the arms dealer’s two days away, ultimately the arms-dealer abandons them, as the police will too. They are left to the shaky Vincent to protect. 

The polished serene Jessie and the damaged Vincent may seem antithetical but ultimately both prove isolated, enclosed in their respective psychological bubbles, unable to make any meaningful connection beyond themselves — except for the family dog, Ghost, an emblem of commitments now dead.

As Vincent grows increasingly enchanted by Jessie, he remains more removed and sombre than his friend Dennis’s later play with her. Vincent reads a romantic invitation into her fantasy of him killing bears in Canada. His delusion that they might have a relationship is harshly ended when he sees her look of fear and revulsion at his repeatedly smashing an invader’s face into the glass coffee table. The willfully uninformed Jessie is appalled at what her protection requires. 

Yet the last shot has Jessie returning to embrace Vincent. Whether she actually does that or he imagines her doing it we can’t firmly say. The film tacitly allows both readings. 

If she does it, she has realized her escape to Canada was impossible and she needs this powerful man to provide the security for which she initially married the arms dealer. If she doesn’t, then Vincent has taken another pathetic step into madness, bolstering his illegal painkillers with an implausible romantic fantasy. Either reading confirms the antithetical characters’ essential similarity as isolates awakened to a brutish disorder.  

     That theme grows out of writer/director Alice Winocour’s earlier Mustang, where three sisters leave their constrictive Innocence for Experience.  The woman’s hand is also evident in the film’s concern for how men are weakened by their strength. Her beefcake shots of Matthias Schoenaerts parody the familiar male fetishizing of the female lead.