Bastards
Paris is purgatory in BASTARDS, a relentlessly bleak contemporary thriller which plunges French director Claire Denis deep into film noir territory. Drawing on William Faulkner’s controversial 1931 novel SANCTUARY, this dark revenge saga stars Vincent Lindon as Marco, a landlocked sea captain investigating his brother-in-law’s apparent suicide. In defending his sister, Sandra (Julie Bataille), and niece, Justine (Lola Créton), against reptilian businessman Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), Marco is sucked into a nightmarish netherworld of betrayal, incest and sexual violence. Shooting in digital for the first time, Denis wrings harrowing performances from a strong ensemble cast, carefully avoiding lurid melodrama.
Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille
- Notes From Kim GordonWhen I first saw this film at the New York Film Festival, I thought it was one of the most devastatingly brutal films I’d ever seen. But I also thought it was beautiful. On second viewing I could really enjoy how gorgeously filmed it was. The dark, muted colors match the mystery of it. All Claire Denis’s films have so much that is mysterious and unspoken, but this one really lives in the dark. The way she used sound recorded from actual situations, like the smashed car going by on a truck bed when the camera stays on it and we hear the noise of the metal and wind combined for a good 30 seconds or so. It folds so well into the rest of the soundtrack.