REVIEW - BASTARDS

A noir mystery that may prove more mysterious to its audience than to its characters, since its concerns lie not with what is done nor said, but with what is thought and what is implied. Claire Denis continues to hone a style of filmmaking whereby what is concealed is infinitely more important than what is revealed, and not for any specific narrative purpose. That all exists to serve her sense of style, and via its misleading structure and lack of contextualisation, Bastards becomes as severe an example of style-over-substance as Denis has mounted thus far in her career. And if cinema is to function as an art form, we rely on artists such as Mme. Denis to continue to hone their singular cinematic styles. And she's hardly pulling the wool over our eyes: Bastards is a stylistic exercise through and through - the opening shots, dazzling and disorientating, of a golden-hewed rain sheeting before metal bars and brick walls, the leaps forward and back in chronology, sometimes even with the intention of deliberately confusing us - these and many more signs that there's nothing of any plot-related purpose here. Beyond the artsy posturing (as assured and accomplished as artsy posturing comes, mind), we are invited inside the characters' heads, in extreme close-ups, wordless shots with the actors' heads slightly tilted, the foreheads accentuated, their moods and motives transmitted from their minds to ours, even if only vaguely, or incorrectly. And it's in this hazy transmission that Denis' motives are also revealed, as she too conceals the specifics of her own objectives, and leaves us to wonder long after the film has finished: what, how, whom, why? Thus, Bastards might be one of the most mysterious mysteries in film history.