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High Life (2019) - Claire Denis In Space

Started by DukeDeMondo, May 14, 2019, 04:35:24 AM

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DukeDeMondo

I don't think there's a thread for this. I couldn't find it if there is.

High Life, so. Here then it is. Claire Denis in space, this time. Finally.

Finally Claire Denis X.

Robert Pattinson is one of several Death Row inmates and Lifers shot towards the heavens in the direction of the nearest black hole, the idea being that these assorted Space Cons might go about harvesting the thing's energy or something like this. The black hole. Harvesting its energy, someway. I think. It doesn't really matter what they're supposed to be doing. Andre 3000 is one of them, too, if you're any way bothered.

Juliette Binoche presides, herself a Space Con, but a higher rank of Space Con for some reason or other. She's indulging in her own bit of harvesting on, this all to do with the wee cups she's handed after the fellas have been in with the Fuck Box Machine for a while. The Orgasmatron. Wee cups full of muck that they reach her on their way back to their quarters. She killed all her children, apparently, Juliette Binoche, away back when. That's what she did.

Sometimes she bucks the muck out of these men herself, drugging them so as they lose consciousness and then mounting them in their beds. Bucking away next till the stuff is dripping from between her legs and she's bending over to scoop it up in her hands. The Greater Good, you know. She has her own fun with the Fuck Box, too. Incredible sights result. Juliette Binoche, her body twisting and contorting and grinding atop this elaborate Sex Machine. Someone called davidehrlich on Letterboxd says of the remarkable scene in question that it is "endowed with the tortured energy of a Cirque du Soleil routine," and that's about as good a description as any I've come across (pun &c., &c.). My jaw hit the floor the moment I realised I was watching from within as a mechanical cock was thrusting up into Juliette Binoche's insides, again and again and again.

The narrative is elliptical and non-linear. Some of it takes place when the only living beings aboard the vessel are Robert Pattinson and a child that has appeared from somewhere. Some of it takes place here on Earth, long ago, when the Space Cons were only but wee. Some of it takes place when the child has grown to become a teenager, learning all about Earth and the World Beyond Worlds and the things that go on in both places, learning most of this from a load of old taped-off-TV that she has at her beck and call. Some of it takes place when the corridors are full of life, and rape and battery is the song of the day.

Throughout, the camera fixes tight on wracked faces – usually Pattinson's – and skin scarred or soon to be scarring, the image cramped until it isn't, until it's gazing upon the whole of the universe now without warning as it maybe warps around an exploding head.
   
Brings to mind Douglas Trumbull, Solaris, ok, obvious things that it brings to mind. Under The Skin. All of these. Obvious.

It's a profoundly misanthropic affair for the most part, as you might imagine. It's also these things: breathtakingly beautiful; absolutely despairing; unfathomably brutal; unexpectedly and unwarrantedly hopeful.

It's also replete with images that hang about the eyes for ages after, whether you'd really wish them to or not. Some depicting outer space, some depicting inner, some depicting with uncommon ferocity what it looks like when the inner is made outer all of a sudden.

The title card doesn't appear till near 20 minutes in. If that doesn't tell you what sort of film this is that Claire Denis has made in space then I don't know what will. Claire Denis in space, dreaming these terrible dreams of hers somewhere away up in creation's pitch, far out of the road.

"...moving backwards instead of moving forwards. Getting further from what's getting nearer..."

This is what Robert Pattinson says to himself at one point.

Taboo and transgression. Discipline and surveillance. The infinite in the finite. Continuity and eternal remove. These are the kinds of things that it has on its mind. Heavy sorts of thoughts. Heavy sorts of thoughts to be thinking.

I thought it was brilliant. High Life. Absolutely brilliant. That's the long and the short of it. By turns horrifying and mesmerising and bewitching and empowering and debasing. I can't recommend it enough, provided you're in the mood for something like that. Something challenging and uncompromising and confrontational that Thinks Big Thoughts right up in your face. That's what this is.

It's also, for me, the best film Claire Denis has made in God knows how long. Up there with Chocolat and 35 Shots Of Rum and things like this, far as I'm concerned.

High Life (2019). I dunno if you've seen it or not or what your thoughts on it are if you have? You'll know better than me. I'd like to hear them, anyway. The thoughts.

PlanktonSideburns

fuck youre good at reviews. going to be checking this out, doubly so after reading this.

also, was it you that suggested the weird studies podcast on here somewhere a while back, if so thanks, its really great, sorry to derail

not heard of claire denis, what else by her should i be checking out by the way?


C_Larence

Missing the point of your whole review I know, but David Ehrlich has to be one of the worst film critics going.

mjwilson

There was no BBFC card before this when I saw it. This may have contributed to at least 4 walk outs during it.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: mjwilson on May 14, 2019, 06:22:38 PM
There was no BBFC card before this when I saw it. This may have contributed to at least 4 walk outs during it.

Oh I wonder what caused the walk outs? Was it the violence or the tedium that got to them, do you think? (I don't think it's tedious, by the by, but I can see how it might feel so here and there if you catch it on the wrong day)

Quote from: PlanktonSideburns on May 14, 2019, 07:18:05 AM
also, was it you that suggested the weird studies podcast on here somewhere a while back, if so thanks, its really great, sorry to derail

Yeah I recommended the Weird Studies podcast a wee while back, I'm really glad you're enjoying it. And thank you very much for such kind words, I look forward to hearing what you make of this High Life when you get round to it. As for Claire Denis, I'd say you'll get a pretty good grasp of what she's all about if you start with Chocolat - not to be confused with the Johnny Depp picture of the same name from a decade or so later - and Trouble Every Day, which I didn't really care for before, as I said in the post up above, but I watched it again this afternoon and the years have been kind to it. Doesn't feel anything like as tryhard or empty as it used to feel. For the most part. Arriving as it did at the height of the New French Extremism - and with Vincent Gallo still operating at Peak Obnoxious -  it felt like a pretty minor sort of a thing, somehow. A film that hadn't very much of worth to say, coasting on the back of a couple horrific sequences nestled away in the second half. It doesn't feel like that any more. Far more weight to it than I had clocked whenever ago. It has a lot in common with High Life, actually. Fractured narrative that plays out across several timespaces. Extreme close ups that sweep across the human body in such a way as to render it utterly alien. Tactile, haptic sorts of images. Sense of being pressed up against the skin of the thing even as you're ten thousand miles removed. Like a Dardenne Brothers film sometimes, in that regard, but with added cannibalism and sexual violence. I wonder if it was any sort of influence on Jim Jarmusch when he was writing Only Lovers Left Alive? Who knows.

I would start with those two, anyway. Between them they cover most of the bases.

Quote from: C_Larence on May 14, 2019, 01:50:54 PM
Missing the point of your whole review I know, but David Ehrlich has to be one of the worst film critics going.

Oh, I didn't know he was a professional critic. I've just read a couple of his recent reviews and I thought they were decent enough. Why do you dislike him so much, out of interest?

C_Larence

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on May 14, 2019, 06:30:10 PM
Oh, I didn't know he was a professional critic. I've just read a couple of his recent reviews and I thought they were decent enough. Why do you dislike him so much, out of interest?

He's a writer at Indiewire. I came across him through twitter, where he posts "hot takes" for attention and generally comes across as an insufferable contrarian, but it's ok because he knows he's self aware so it's 'ironic'. I find that if he likes a film I will almost always hate it. Plus, he is on record as saying The Big Lebowski is the Coen brother's worst movie.

Phil_A

Nous vivons la grande vie, nous la vivons bieeeeeen...

mjwilson

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on May 14, 2019, 06:30:10 PM
Oh I wonder what caused the walk outs? Was it the violence or the tedium that got to them, do you think? (I don't think it's tedious, by the by, but I can see how it might feel so here and there if you catch it on the wrong day)

Two after the main violent incident, two after the first fuck-box scene.

In a curious title-related coincidence, the last film I saw with lots of walk-outs was High Rise.

peanutbutter

Quote from: C_Larence on May 14, 2019, 01:50:54 PM
Missing the point of your whole review I know, but David Ehrlich has to be one of the worst film critics going.
My biggest issue with Letterbox'd is that I've no way to block his reviews. He's always the most popular review for just about anything he reviews, so right up top of the page. Even when I actually agree with him the tone of his reviews is just such a performative chore.

Wanna see this but honestly dont know if I'll be in the mood for it while it's in the cinema.

chveik

Quote from: peanutbutter on May 14, 2019, 11:25:24 PM
Wanna see this but honestly dont know if I'll be in the mood for it while it's in the cinema.

it has leaked already.

weirdly I've never watched a Claire Denis film. I don't really have a choice now, after such brilliant review.

lipsink

This is a great film. Although a bit too much jizz in it for my liking.

Josef K

Completely agree with all the praise in this thread.

One thing I loved was the understated design of the ship - not sleek, high tech or futuristic. Looks like it could've been a rejected early design for the Wallace & Gromit spaceship and parts of the interior were like an 80s office building.

Came out thinking how Clare Denis would do a brilliant adaptation of The Book of Strange New Things

SteveDave



R Pattz has the look of young Arnold "Arnie" "Terminader" Schwarzenegger there.

PlanktonSideburns

Just got back from watching this at Home Manchester on their lovely big screen with their well qual sound system

What a ride! Definitely made me thrilled in the watching, will sit with it before saying more but definitely pushed some buttons! Some thoughts

Robert pattison has a goulish handsomeness. In a few years he would be a great lookalike for ed gein - would quite like to see him play him

Juliet  binoche is an awesome screen presence, more of that sort of thing I say.

Dex Sawash

Sounds like it has a few of my favored themes

Thursday

Just saw it.

This was not a fun Marijuana-based comedy at all! Very angry at the false advertising!

Junglist

Saw it at Home Manchester on Friday.

This shit is legit

mrpupkin

I saw this last night and hated it a lot to be honest. Bum-gazing bollocks and dull to boot. Gestures in the direction of interesting ideas (debasement in the name of progress, the animality underwriting our 'rational' modern projects, the will to life beyond reason etc) but wastes any potential thematic richness and instead just meanders around looking down its nose at you, saying nothing interesting or even coherent and taking a fucking age to say it. The characters a ridiculous posh person's idea of what death row inmates would be like and brought to life with all the verisimilitude of me doing GCSE drama (Pattinson and the baby excepted, and sometimes Binoche, but only sometimes). Contrives to repulse, and does so, but I don't see any reason to applaud the enactment of brutality for its own sake, and see no value in these scenes beyond allowing people to feel they're engaging with the cruelty of dispossession by watching some ridiculous abstraction of it screened for their pleasure in a Curzon cinema for £15 a go. I should probably have swerved this after seeing the Denis-directed Let the Sunshine In last year which was fucking wank too. She makes me feel like Michael Owen #hatefilms

PlanktonSideburns

I feel somewhere between mrpumpkin and dukedemondo on this one.

There was some blinding scenes in this, great performances all round, and was thrilling while it was on, but I didn't really get very much out of it emotionally, it hasn't really stayed with me for some reason. It feels like a very weighty film, but I can't really seem to get below the surface of the 'people having a right shit time of it in space' narrative. This might just be me being a thick cunt sure. I've been watching

All the twilight films
Eighth grade
And dragged across concrete

All of wich were more thrilling in the moment, and left me with loads more to think and marvel about after watching. Again, maybe I'm just too dense to see what's really going on here, I felt like this was a really grim space procedural with a couple of mad, brilliant scenes in, but mostly just a load of sods pottering around on a grubby spaceship fly tipping plastic bottles everywhere and occasionally raping eachother - maybe a realistic view of what a space penal conoly but why do I want to see that? That raunchy shot of the nurse destroying the Fuck box felt like a music video interlude, not very connected to the drama

SteveDave

I saw this and preferred Duke's review more.

greenman

Quote from: mrpupkin on May 24, 2019, 11:43:51 AM
I should probably have swerved this after seeing the Denis-directed Let the Sunshine In last year which was fucking wank too. She makes me feel like Michael Owen #hatefilms

I didn't dislike that but equally it did seem to be feeding that preference in some circles for recent French drama that's deliberately obtuse, if your going to go that route I think the style really needs to stand on its own as say Holy Motors. I do tend to prefer the likes of Two Days, One Night or Blue is the Warmest Colour that are actually willing to nail their colours to the mask dramatically.

Puce Moment

Liked it a great deal. For me, Denis is like Mike Leigh or Wes Andersen or Pedro Almodovar.. They put stuff out regularly and I sort of don't mind it too much, but then every now and again they come out with a corker. Ship-bound SF is often a draw for indie directors because it is far easier to film in a studio, and therefore much cheaper. I think this was a good addition to the oeuvre.

I've never seen Twilight so I really only know this kid for stuff like The Rover, Good Time and Cosmopolis. I like him.

zomgmouse

I think this took me to places I'm still going to be unpacking in god knows how long.

So cold and damp and dark and yet and yet and yet... a little glimmer of togetherness and of our common human bonds.

What a fantastic sense of mood.


[tag] Ground control to Major Cum [/tag]

garbed_attic

My father seemed pissed off at my assertion that the film was, as I understood it, a Lacanian response to Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' in which Denis posits that if the incest taboo undergirds civilisations and its discontents (rendered here in the most Foucauldian light possible) then a new model of society might be built from a foundationational embrace of incest and desire.


Twit 2

Quote from: gout_pony on June 28, 2019, 10:46:07 PM
My father seemed pissed off at my assertion that the film was, as I understood it, a Lacanian response to Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' in which Denis posits that if the incest taboo undergirds civilisations and its discontents (rendered here in the most Foucauldian light possible) then a new model of society might be built from a foundationational embrace of incest and desire.

Parklife!

Chriddof

Okay, I have to interrupt proceedings with something that I've been feeling for ages, and it's taken this film to finally prompt me into writing about it. I am sick of modern cinema. Absolutely fucking sick of it. It's nothing but shit that's either like being spoonfed gruel (this movie), or "entertainment" where it's like being spoonfed gruel from a bowl with a logo on it (everything else). It's all shit, with very very few exceptions. Where's all the funny films, for a start? Why is everything so fucking morose? I mean I do know why, you all know why; but Jesus, give us a reason to go on with our lives rather than fucking prompt us to shoot ourselves. And give us some films that have more than two colours at any one time, while you're at it.

Can we have some enjoyable things to watch rather than airy obtuse bollocks like this, or three hour adverts for other three hour adverts coming out in 2022? Something with joy, warmth, fun, and a basic sense of human decency rather than people sticking their cocks in a box while wagging their finger at us. And the director can fuck off for her "I don't care about the Weinstein scandal" remarks, which miss the point in a way only the elder population of France can achieve.

I'm sorry if I've irritated people who like Denis's work, but I'm miserable as fuck and have been so for fucking years now, and I want to watch movies that might possibly brighten things up a tiny bit and spur me on to getting out of bed every morning rather than lie frozen in it after my latest nightmare has ended. Just staring up at the ceiling, contemplating life in a way that I don't really need some fucking film director to remind me about. The world right now is shit, granted... and what else can you tell us?

garbed_attic

Quote from: Chriddof on June 29, 2019, 07:49:18 AM
Okay, I have to interrupt proceedings with something that I've been feeling for ages, and it's taken this film to finally prompt me into writing about it. I am sick of modern cinema. Absolutely fucking sick of it. It's nothing but shit that's either like being spoonfed gruel (this movie), or "entertainment" where it's like being spoonfed gruel from a bowl with a logo on it (everything else). It's all shit, with very very few exceptions. Where's all the funny films, for a start? Why is everything so fucking morose? I mean I do know why, you all know why; but Jesus, give us a reason to go on with our lives rather than fucking prompt us to shoot ourselves. And give us some films that have more than two colours at any one time, while you're at it.

Can we have some enjoyable things to watch rather than airy obtuse bollocks like this, or three hour adverts for other three hour adverts coming out in 2022? Something with joy, warmth, fun, and a basic sense of human decency rather than people sticking their cocks in a box while wagging their finger at us. And the director can fuck off for her "I don't care about the Weinstein scandal" remarks, which miss the point in a way only the elder population of France can achieve.

I'm sorry if I've irritated people who like Denis's work, but I'm miserable as fuck and have been so for fucking years now, and I want to watch movies that might possibly brighten things up a tiny bit and spur me on to getting out of bed every morning rather than lie frozen in it after my latest nightmare has ended. Just staring up at the ceiling, contemplating life in a way that I don't really need some fucking film director to remind me about. The world right now is shit, granted... and what else can you tell us?

Just off the top of my head, three films from the last few years that are joyous (in places at least) and are distinctively of the late 2010s:

Of Body and Soul:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UE6IU2mhU8

Lu Over the Wall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rea2ZZLy-k4

The Forbidden Room:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YQw6KLJGf8

Chriddof

I'll check those out, thank you. Apologies for the rant.

I must admit that whenever this kind of thing gets praised, the snarky part of my brain goes "Oh, an austere, detached art film, good thing nobody's done one of those before".