Claire Denis‘ The Bastards (Les Salaudes) may actually have a decent story, but she has muddled up the narrative to the point it’s confusing as all hell. Even once the pieces start to come together, the film comes to a head-scratching conclusion of sex with corncobs and a close-up of a guy stroking his penis.
Let’s begin with the plot details I gathered after the opening moments and see where we get…
It’s raining very hard. A man has killed himself. A girl is walking naked in the streets. A man named Marco (Vincent Lindon) works aboard a container ship and receives a phone call with a family emergency and heads home immediately. Upon arrival he moves into an apartment without any furnishings. Here he makes eyes at the woman living downstairs and helps fix the chain on her son’s bicycle.
Following the film’s opening minutes, those were the things I knew. I don’t know if Denis thought everything was all clear after that information was revealed, but as it turns out we are still missing a lot of important details that would help it all make a lot more sense. Let’s take a look again with all the information in place.
The film begins with a man killing himself and a woman walking naked in the rain. Marco is called back to Paris by his sister, Sandra (Julie Bataille), because her husband (Laurent Grevill) — whom Marco is good friends with — has just commit suicide and her daughter, Justine (Lola Creton), has been admitted into a hospital as a victim of abuse and rape that has damaged her vagina to the point it may require surgery. Justine is also the woman we saw walking naked in the rain.
The woman Marco sees in his apartment turns out to be a woman by the name of Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), a single mother with a young son, and mistress to Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), a man that contributed money to Sandra’s family business and she is convinced he had something to do with her daughter’s current state. Marco’s goal is to get at Edouard through Raphaëlle.
Like I said, a lot of information is hidden from the audience for reasons entirely unknown to me. And the details mentioned above are just the beginning.
Walking out of the screening a couple critics I talked to actually thought Raphaëlle was married to Edouard, not his mistress. It took me forever to learn Marco was Sandra’s brother and not her husband, or just a friend of her dead husband or both. It’s never made clear he’s her sister until they blatantly come out and say it. Even then, where is Marco’s wife? We learn he has a daughter, but the rest is a mystery. It’s also about 15 minutes into the movie before we learn who the naked girl walking in the middle of the street was and even further into the film before we learn Marco didn’t just leave his job, he quit and is having to sell his property and car to make sure he has any money.
I know what you may be thinking, “But isn’t a bit of ambiguity better? No one wants everything spelled out for them.” Yes, but not when the film doesn’t seem to be presenting these things as if there is any question. All throughout I felt I just wasn’t getting it, and who knows, maybe I wasn’t, though some others appeared to be just as confused as I was.
It would appear Denis meant the film be revealed in layers, but I can’t believe she meant for it to be this confusing. Granted, the answers to some of the questions I ask above may be in the film and I simply missed them, but all I know is that I kept running through one scenario after another, trying to figure who everyone was and in what capacity they were related to the people in the film and the story altogether. I walked away with the impression Denis forgot the audience didn’t know these people the way she and co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau did and didn’t realize the details she was gave us only confused matters rather than actually helped.
Then we get to scenes with bloody corncobs covered in tons of pubic hair and semen-stained, red oval couches with camera hookups in the ceiling. Yet, as more details are revealed, more go unanswered.
As the credits started to roll, the loudest question I had was, “What the hell was that all about?” It’s one thing to play tricks with your narrative, but Denis has got to know this film just doesn’t add up as we’re left to walk out of the theater after watching a homemade rape film and as another piece of electronica plays over the credits.
Visually, the film is quite dark. Denis and her DP, Agnes Godard, shot in digital and definitely went for a darker, more atmospheric look and the score from Tindersticks started to grate on me as one scene bleeds into another about midway through the film as the sound of a ticking clock played underneath a throbbing single electric tone, which could be heard through much of the film.
Like I said, this story may have worked had it not been so cluttered up into meaningless mess of mumbo-jumbo. The performances are solid, Lindon and Mastroianni are particularly impressive and I have nothing at all wrong with the dark material, but the way it was presented just all seemed so meaningless that it felt like a film that was presented incomplete.
