What these films have in common is that they deliver the thrill and terror of space travel with a safe remove and an authenticity buttressed by state-of-the-art special effects. Remember how shocking the weightlessness seemed in Apollo 13 about 24 years ago? That seems quaint now.
Director Claire Denis' new film High Life doesn't provide any of the pleasures of recent astronaut adventures. It is an aggressively opaque and meandering movie, one that almost seems intended to test an audience's patience.
It literally opens with a long, extended, mostly wordless sequence featuring its nominal star, Robert Pattison, comforting a very upset baby. What am I watching? I found myself asking repeatedly.
High Life has something to do with a crazy doctor, played with devastating eroticism by Juliette Binoche, who is essentially holding a group of attractive male and female prisoners captive so she can extract sperm from the men to use to impregnate the women, for reasons I must admit I didn't truly comprehend.Save for a few jarring explosions of violence and some truly squirm-inducing sex scenes -- much of High Life is hushed and ethereal.
Pattison, who has matured into a compelling leading man (he was robbed of an Oscar nom a couple years ago for his work in Good Time) is largely neutered of his charisma here -- but at least his wonderfully expressive face is interesting to look at.
Besides Binoche, the next biggest standout to me is OutKast veteran Andre Benjamin (a.k.a. Andre 3000) who has a supporting role as perhaps the most relatable convict on this ship. His performance here suggests that he could still fulfill the promise of a major movie career with the right role to exploit his flaky humor and warmth.
The broader experience of watching High Life, however, left me very cold -- and not in a probing, insidious Kubrickian way. The craft of this film is undeniable -- I have no idea what it cost to produce -- but it has a very distinct, arresting look and claustrophobic atmosphere. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't struggle with dozing off during it and it's strange, creepy plot kept slipping through my fingers like sand through an hourglass.
Part of the problem -- for me at least -- is he film's elliptical structure -- it's largely told in flashbacks that are not easily differentiated from the movie's present. It's clear Denis is aiming for a more immersive, sensory experience than a character driven one. But without any real connection to the material I found every close-up of fluid and every rush of blood to be a purely clinical exercise.
This is a movie with strong sex and violence in it -- with sexy actors -- and it should be provocative but I found the filmmaking so self aware, so smug that I couldn't surrender to the film's glacial pacing. It turns out the movie is just under two hours, but it feels like a cool three.
It's the feeling I sometimes get from the work of Michael Haneke: I may not be smart enough for this work, it clearly thinks its smarter than me and much of its audience, and it is so determined to not be 'enjoyed' that it can't be.
This is the kind of anti-commercial sci-fi film that critics are rapturous for and audiences can't stand. The sparsely attended screening I attended definitely had people shifting in their seats and checking their watches.
I've come to believe that the idea moviegoing experience would be a happy medium between the more short-term gratifying nonsense of the Marvel movies and the brooding auteurism on display here. I could be convinced to reconsider this one -- especially since a lot of people I respect adore it -- but I'll need a few cups of coffee first.
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