Barbarian

  What happens when an attractive young documentary film researcher stumbles into the horror genre? 

You get an acid vision of post-Reagan America. We are, after all, experiencing the America that grew out of the Reagan trickle-down economics and bubble-up right-wing populism. The film’s title is a concise summary.

As we see, the monster’s father stayed in the ostensibly proper Detroit suburb when civilization left. The once idyllic American neighbourhood is now a ruin. In a clash of elements an Air BnB now conceals — and feeds — an underground horror chamber where the ideal of nursing motherhood has turned monstrous. The monster stalks the night — and the rental above— for prisoners she can force into being her sucklings. As she kills the non-obliging, her parody of nursing does keep at least Tess alive. 

In the final irony, the end titles play against the ‘50s rock classic Be My Baby. That romantic anthem has become a monster’s fatal compulsion. Indeed the female monster is a bitter amplification of the imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre, the novel discovd incestuous ered in a tenant’s suitcase. 

The documentary context extends from heroine Tess’s responsible profession down to the porn studio in the cavern. The monster supplies her now helpless old father with videos of the prisoners they have tortured — presumably starting with the housewife we see him setting up for abduction. In contrast, in Tess’s new project a woman filmmaker covers the reclaiming of abandoned properties— whether neighbourhoods or values.  

Once confronted with a normal man — the TV producer AJ — the monster’s father kills himself. But how “normal”  is AJ? 

As the plot’s ostensible hero he is totally compromised. He’s the absentee and oblivious owner of the property now so poisoned. He has come to liquidate it in order to pay his legal charges to defend against a rape charge. As he describes the incident to a buddy and as he indiscreetly tells the woman’s answering machine, she has a strong case. As the monster is a perversion of motherhood  AJ is a perversion of romantic manhood. 

In exploring the property he has so long neglected he so obsesses over his measurement that he fails to see the dangers around hi

He even fails as the film’s “hero,” despite his part in freeing Tess. While his shooting her may be accidental, he instinctively sacrifices Tess to deflect the monster, to save himself. As befits such a film-centered hero AJ has his eyes gouged out. 

The monster’s female nature may be unusual, but the sexual threat is largely accorded the male: from the monster’s rapist father down to the rapist AJ. She is the product and victim of her father’s rapes. Indeed the threatening atmosphere is so sexual that in his first scenes with Tess Keith may well be innocent. But the scene ripples with sexual danger. His nightmares and her mysteriously opening doors catch the danger in their minds — and in the underground of their world. 

With these themes and strategy this is a contemporary take on the classic horror genre, extremely polished and effective.

Both Sides of the Blade

  In this brilliant romantic tragedy a solid woman Sara (Juliette Binoche) is torn between her committed lover Jean (Vincent Lindon) and her wild former passion Francois (Gregoire Colin). 

The film opens on Sara’s idyllic seaside holiday with Jean and ends with her left alone, a victim of her own emotions, her lover’s selfishness and — as if all that were not enough — mischance. A lifetime of womanly obedience ends in dashed loves and a dark solitude.

The scenes of intimacy and conflict stand up to anything in Bergman.  The predominantly low string score tightens the lovers’ tension throughout.

As this is a Claire Denis film the romantic plot is given a political correlative. As one of Sara’s radio interviewees cites Fritz Fanon, racism is a psychological problem because it is rooted in people being locked-in in their identities. So here are the three central lovers. When Francois resurfaces as Jean’s business partner and Sara’s disaster, she tries to negotiate between her two lovers. She is ultimately betrayed by one man and her own compulsiveness. 

The political theme also involves 15-year-old Marcus, Jean’s black son from his marriage to a Martinique woman. Jean tries to save the despairing teen from letting himself be defined by the dominant white society and resigned to servitude. That’s Sara’s struggle too. The epilogue is a pallid, lifeless scene of Jean and Marcus at a juvenile rugby practice, their spirit lost.    

        The title? It's those damned locked-in identities. If you're not cut from the outside you do it within.

        Claire Denis has had an astonishing year. She has made two world-class films, this and Stars at Noon (see my posting). In both she balances the personal and the political. Both have remarkably explicit sex scenes, always with a point both psychological and political. The performances, scripts and cinematics are uniformly brilliant/

Stars at Noon

  Claire Denis’s latest post-colonial anatomy of oppression is a contemporary replay of the 1984 Sandanista revolution in Nicaragua. Hence the covid masks, cellphones and assumption of American weakness.   

As the American wouldbe journalist trying to escape, Trish (Margaret Qualley, Andie Macdowell’s daughter) has a curiously Latina aspect in her character. With her fluency in Spanish, her dark hair and striking, undernourished features she could “pass.” But her expose of government kidnappings and killings have frozen her passport. Her pretence to press privilege is false. The American publisher of tourist blather wants nothing to do with her.  She is rootless in a strange land.

To buy airfare home she sells sex — but only for US dollars. She also uses sex to keep two local “friends” to help her. As she says, “one can’t get it up.” That would be the fossil Minister of — wait for it — Vice. The other, a studly selfserving cop — to her tribulation — can. Her last hope — both for escape and sexual satisfaction — is the mysterious British salesman Daniel, who himself turns into a political liability when he meets her in that lions’ den. The backdoor that served the prostitutes in her hotel room has no state equivalent. 

The helpless American’s dependence upon the white-suited Brit is itself a historic echo of damaging colonialism. As in her abbreviation of Patricia, Trish is reduced altogether, unable to draw on American support, disdained by the locals, especially those who suffer for trying to help her, like the driver whose lifeline auto is burned for his effort. The outside world isn’t awed by “America” anymore. 

So for all her modernity the lovely Trish remains exemplar of The Ugly American. She insults the black owner of her motel, her “cesspool.” Though scrambling (so to speak) for the Yankee dollar, Trish lavishes cordobes on the locals whom she endangers with her demands. For all her presumption of agency — both as American and as Modern Woman — her salvation rests with a CIA doofus. 

Denis’s film is an experience. Its scenes of wit, arousal and initiative barely conceal its overwhelming spirit of helplessness. Hence perhaps the title. Stars at noon? As the times are out of joint, it’s that cursed spite that our poor lovable Trish was born to set it right!  

        Check out my piece on Denis's followup film, Both Sides of the Blade.