Hearts on Ice

Critics like to complain that there just aren’t any truly challenging art films anymore. It’s just not like it was in the ’60s, when Susan Sontag would run to catch an Antonioni movie across town and bump into Jonas Mekas on his way back from the new Bergman film. Well, congratulations, Nashville! Claire Denis’ The Intruder is complex, abstruse and guaranteed to keep you puzzling over it for weeks, provided you don’t dive in expecting it to make the usual kind of linear-narrative “sense.” One of contemporary French cinema’s preeminent auteurs, Denis is perhaps best known for Beau Travail, her minimalist, balletic take on Billy Budd, but comparatively speaking The Intruder is crammed with incident. Denis reaches back to her earlier genre explorations, such as I Can’t Sleep and No Fear No Die, but she processes that material through her more recent, poetically inclined cinematic style. The result is an elusive, dreamlike tale of an isolated man of means (Michel Subor) traveling from France to South Korea to procure a black-market transplant heart. The story of a spy who came in from the cold, The Intruder is in fact quite linear in its organization. What the film doesn’t do is engage in any real exposition. Instead, Denis shows us the negative space around a problem or an event. This freedom allows her to focus instead on texture, long passages of world travel and several iterations of the theme of intrusion. The film begins at the French/Swiss border, for example, and the border guard and her husband later play a kind of sex game relating to her work role. The movie’s biggest intruder is the lead character’s heart; his body rejects the transplant. If Denis’ film has any real flaw, it may be that the director is placing her prodigious talent in the service of some rather straightforward themes—among them the idea of a “change of heart.” But if The Intruder abandons many of cinema’s usual storytelling techniques, in return it provides a pure plastic sensuality, its isolated moments coalescing into an experience of total immersion. (The cinematography by Denis’ longtime collaborator Agnès Godard is succulent as always.) Think of the movie as the most elliptical episode of Alias ever made, focusing on Jack Bristow instead of Sydney. Oh, and what’s the French actress Béatrice Dalle doing on a dogsled? I have no idea.