I saw Claire Denis‘ Bastards (Les Salaudes) in Cannes earlier this year and it has one of my favorite opening paragraphs to a review I’ve ever written:
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.
Today IFC released the first domestic trailer for the film, which they plan on releasing in theaters on October 23 (iTunes on Oct. 25) and in their description they call it a “gripping thriller about money, sex and power” telling the story of “a ship captain returns to Paris to seek vengeance on the man suspected of causing his brother-in-law’s suicide.” The story seems simple enough, but the telling is far from being so simple.
With that, here are the next few paragraphs from my review, explaining how the plot is laid out for the audience:
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.
All that and we still haven’t gotten to the bloody corncobs covered in pubic hair and semen-stained, red oval couches. That’s right, this film has a lot more to offer and a lot less to love.
Check out the trailer below.
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