L’intrus

Telling a story in pictures and sound, without a conventional narrative structure: with this guiding principle, Claire Denis continues her quest for a pure film language. Denis goes a step further in L’intrus with this approach that she previously adopted in Beau travail. The film was inspired by the book by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy from 2000. Another source was In the South Seas (1896) by Robert Louis Stevenson, about the islands in the Pacific Ocean. A Frenchman (Michel Subor, the commander in Beau travail) takes out a large amount of money from a Swiss bank account for his heart transplant. After the operation, he travels on to South Korea (where we see in a guest role Kim Dong-Ho, director of the Pusan International Film Festival), to discuss his plans for the construction of his dreamboat. Then the protagonist continues on his journey to Tahiti to find a long-lost son there. L’intrus is a personal film you can identify with about someone who wants to start a new, freer and more beautiful life with a new heart. A world voyage and inner quest, with the appealing cinemascope language of Denis’ regular partner Agnès Godard. (SdH)