The Intruder

I'm usually an old-fashioned, literal-minded type who hates European movies that tantalize us with plots they have no intention of resolving. Unless they're really good, like L'Avventura, they just make me mad. I think French culture would be infinitely better off if its high-school students weren't required to write a goddamn philosophical essay to graduate.

But while Claire Denis' dreamy movie is no masterpiece, it strikes me as the real thing, not a froggy fraud. Michel Subor plays the savagely existential sexagenarian hero, Louis, who lives on the snowy border between Switzerland and France (and between past and present, reality and some metaphysical otherworld). He's a man's man, or rather a dog's man, taking bracing baths in icy streams and bonding with his huskies. He's somewhat interested in his dog breeder (Béatrice Dalle), though she brushes off his musky advances. As for his son (Grégoire Colin), they're definitely not on familial terms. Louis' Jack London aloneness is markedly contrasted with his son's palpable, natural affection for his wife and kids.

The intruder in question is the rich old man's mysterious heart. He's got a bum ticker, so naturally he buys a heart of dark provenance on the black market. For no particular reason, he must take his newly sewn-in blood pump to his decades-ago shack in Tahiti, which is somehow mixed up in the troubles with his son.

OK, having read this far, you're never going to understand the plot any better than you (or I) do now. And yet the film is a not-to-miss visual experience. Cinematographer Agnès Godard gloriously captures image after arresting image, and Denis' montage somehow makes perfect emotional sense, even while it tantalizes your rational mind. It's subversive, a sneak attack under the radar of reason's borders.

And for once, these French intellectual pretensions make a satisfying kind of sense. Louis is an intruder everywhere he goes, imposing himself on women, his own blood, alien cultures. (Raised in Africa, Denis knows all about colonialism.) Heartless, he can rip out anybody's heart for his own murky purposes. His memories and reveries intrude upon his present life—the whole movie might be a deathbed flashback, à la Jacob's Ladder. It's also invaded by footage of Subor as a young man in the 1965 movie Le Reflux. And haunted by the tropical travel journals of the dying Robert Louis Stevenson (who wrote Le Reflux's source story) and the ghost of doomed Gauguin in Polynesia.

The Intruder isn't a tidy philosophical essay. Rather, it's a beautiful patchwork that will trouble your dreams, in many ways, for some time.