Robert Pattinson in “High Life.” credit: thelastthingisee.com
Far more interesting than outrightly successful, Claire Denis’ newest film, High Life (USA / France) is quite a departure from her last few films, last year’s Let The Sunshine In (Un Beau Soleil Intérieur) and the murky noir Bastards (Les Salauds) from 2013. It’s a project she’s wanted to do for years – a science-fiction outer-space story about a grown man and his tiny baby daughter stranded alone on a ship in space.
The larger story is told in expansive flashbacks; the ship is a prison, and its crew are male and female convict-volunteers who man the vehicle as it travels to a black hole to record and transmit back data. A crew member must transmit reports every 24 hours to engage the next 24-hours-worth of life support systems. The only other authority of any kind is the doctor, Dibs (Juliette Binoche, exuding a kinky, sinister Shakespearean presence), who runs seemingly pointless experiments in reproduction and fertilization using the inmates as subjects, and administers the dosages of the sedatives that are introduced into the air systems, keeping the volatile prisoners less volatile. Our protagonist, Monte (rock-solid Robert Pattinson) stays busy maintaining the ship, doing the reports and avoiding Dibs’ daily collections of sperm, blood, or whichever other humours she can avail herself of regularly. Some of the inmates are actually somewhat normal, for convicted criminals – Monte is, relatively, and Tcherny (André Benjamin, aka André 3000), who tends the ship’s lush garden habitat. The ethereal Nansen (Agata Buzek) functions pretty straightforwardly. But the tattooed and twitchy Chandra (Lars Eidinger) will be going off, and the devoted couple Elektra and Boyse (Gloria Obianyo and Mia Goth) put up a convincingly tough front, alternately submitting to and rebelling against the timeless slow grind. The crew’s time seems constant, but the further they are from earth, and the closer they get to the black hole, earth time accelerates, so everyone they knew on earth is now almost certainly dead while they only feel a few years older.
Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson in “High Life.” credit: thelastthingisee.com
Denis eschews bigger-budget shiny objects and special effects – it’s a prison, after all, a big dull brown box with grey steel panels, and padded beige corridors. Denis’ stories and/or characters usually express a sense of displacement or a struggle against displacing circumstances, and, despite the narrative departure for her, the film stays true to those concerns. There are many elements of standard prison dramas – confinement, violence, absence of free will. But at the screening I attended, with Claire Denis present, she lit up when asked about how Andrei Tarkovsky’s films might have influenced her own; she loved the idea of Space being not a place of battles or scientific discovery, but a place of transference for memories and dreams. There are holes in the story you could steer an Imperial Cruiser through, but Denis prioritizes emotion and the darker eccentricities of humanity over a cleanly outlined narrative, and the film is peppered with a few jawdropping images courtesy of Yorick Le Saux and Tomasz Naumiuk (standing in for Denis’ more frequent cinematographer Agnès Godard).
A meditation rather than an adventure, the film is far closer to Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, or the more abstracted sections of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. (Or, of course, Tarkovsky’s Solaris). It’s well worth seeing – even with its more porous narrative structure and lack of dynamics or humor, you haven’t seen many films much like it, and it’ll stay with you long after the credits roll.
Periscope In The Bathtub 