Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Grumpy The films of the genius Claire Denis often confuse and irritate American viewers in particular, because my fellow Americans are used to being told a story, not watching an image. In "Bastards" the idea is that too many conventions are dumped out with the scraps. It's difficult to follow something that is deliberately trying to confound your logical mind in order to get you to stop being so logical. Especially if the subject of the exposition is sex, and even more especially if the sex is incestuous--or appears to be, anyway.Denis deliberately cast female actors who resemble each other as a man's daughter, sister and lover. If you're not paying close attention (and even if you are) the blurring of boundaries is shocking. It will take the determined viewer a while to figure out what's supposed to be going on, especially if said viewer is reading the subtitles. I mean, how great is that? You read those little yellow notes and BOOM. This very weird thing is going on, that's not really weird because it's just an accident of appearances and a misunderstanding based on illusion.Got it? This manner of playing with your mind is what Claire Denis does in her films. It's not against the law or anything. But when it all starts to pick up speed and you're trying to understand what's happening in a film that refuses to hold your hand and tell you how to feel, you can end up, well, actually feeling something. Scary! Denis is making an comment on an observation. It's about the fact that models in slick magazines all look alike. Women are reduced to a commodity. One can be exchanged for another. What is an individual when a culture has reduced a person to a member of a class that is objectified? Well? The story within one of Denis' films is what is happening inside your head while you watch the movie. It's not on the screen. Like a monkey in a lab, your reactions tell the story and your reactions TO your reactions are the narrative.Good luck. You'll need it.

jadavix "Les Salauds" is one of those slow moving thrillers where it is up to us to piece together exactly what's happening and, more importantly, what has happened to the characters to put them in the situation they are in. We see a fair bit that's troubling, and it's not hard to put together a naked woman, bleeding from the crotch, wandering down a Paris street at night-time, and the later image of a bloody corn cob. Some of the other stuff is more opaque, notably, who each person is and why they are interacting. This is also more important to the story."Les Salauds" tells a tragic story of incest and sexual slavery that is robbed of some of its power by the telling. When the final revelation comes, it's not that shocking, maybe because the aforementioned sights were already so disturbing, or because we are kept in the dark about who the characters are, seemingly to set the stage for one such revelation.There are much, much worse movies in the vein of "don't show, don't tell" - see "The Headless Woman" for an example - but "Les Salauds" is nonetheless unsatisfying in its conclusion. I felt like we didn't get enough from the characters to be surprised about them, as the movie wants us to be.

writers_reign On the whole Claire Dennis doesn't do accessible, it's far too plebeian and might actually entertain the masses rather than stimulate the academic-pseud axis. So it's a tad ironic that her new release features Vincent Lindon, one of the finest French actors of his generation who is incapable of turning in a bad performance even in a crock of merde like this; the irony is that Lindon also starred in the virtual two-hander Vendredi soir, with Valerie Lemercier, which remains arguably Dennis' most accessible film to date and for all I know she hired Lindon again with the idea of coming full circle. The plot, such as it is, is a succession of improbabilities the first of which took place off screen when Lindon signed over his share of the family shoe manufacturing business to his sister and brother-in-law who promptly ran it into the ground. Having established himself as a master mariner he walks away from THAT career equally impulsively in order to support his sister in the wake of her recent widowhood and a wild child daughter. With no visible means of support he moves into a luxury apartment building where Chiara Mastroianni enjoys a large apartment paid for by her older, sadistic, controlling, millionaire lover who is also - by sheer coincidence you understand - involved in the degradation of Lindon's niece. Naturally she is having sex with Lindon within hours of his moving in. Both Lindon and Mastroianni give excellent performances albeit as meaningless as beautiful fauna flourishing around a cesspool.

JulienPlante I realised after watching Bastards that I am a Claire Denis fan. I appreciate her entire body of work and I knew early on she was one of my favourite directors. Each film she has made has moved me and stayed with me.I like her way of filming a story. She never spells the story out for us, none of the characters come out and tell us how they are feeling; instead we have to find our own way into their worlds with visual clues. It is for us to see and follow, to be active in our observations. Somehow Claire Denis manages to reveal things to us in a soft, unassuming way, which then affects us when we read the intense and often deeply buried emotion that spills out.For the making of Bastards, Claire Denis has returned to her team of long-time collaborators, including cinematographer Agnès Godard, indie band Tindersticks for their atmospheric soundtrack, and actors like Vincent Lindon, Gregoire Colin and Michel Subor.With Bastards, Chiara Mastroianni (Beloved) joins this entourage, as does Lola Créton (Goodbye First Love, Something in the Air). While Mastroianni gives her best performance on screen, Créton reveals a lot of herself without ever actually saying more than a few words.Viewers that have not seen any of her previous films may find it harder to appreciate the qualities and intensity of the movie. We are quickly drowning in a story where nearly every character is not likable - here the title Bastards feels very apt.It's a dark and raw film. It has the shadowy mystery of The Intruder, the emotional disturbance of Trouble Every Day, and the intimacy of Vendredi Soir. It's a sordid and brutal revenge drama, but it's also a true modern film noir. Enigmatic and detailed, with dark textures. Sharing with us the fragile and troubled human condition, the characters' bodies are explored in close up, the texture of the skin, the marks and blemishes staring back at us.But, ultimately, what Denis nails every time is the mood. The unseen, unheard mood. The impression we are left with, the vibrations of human energy. This is the real mark of a Claire Denis film.