Leaving the beautiful, long-take photography characteristic of her past celebrated films for crudely edited, cheap-looking digital video and jumping headlong into the revenge thriller drama, Claire Denis‘ “The Bastards” was eye opener when it hit Cannes last month in more ways than one. And it’s been hard to describe for those who haven’t seen it, but now a new French trailer is here to give fans of the filmmaker a taste of the direction she’s gone in.
Starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni and Lola Creton, the story — told in a fractured way that you have to piece together as the movie goes along — essentially follows a man seeking vengeance against the people who forced his brother-in-law to commit suicide. Along the way, he learns that some dirty dudes engaged in some pretty horrific sexual abuse with his niece and he begins a pretty elaborate plan to balance the scales. So yeah, it’s an arthouse “Taken” to some degree, but Denis keeps you always guessing (for better or worse) right through the haunting and thoroughly disturbing finale.
We wrote that ultimately, the movie “feels like what happens when an undeniably great filmmaker stoops to sensationalism.” The picture opens in France on August 7th but is still without a U.S. distributor. Watch below. [Le Blog Du Cinema]
couple of things:
1. It's called "Bastards," not "The Bastards." Oops!
2. It's almost criminal that you don't mention Chiara Mastroianni, given, you know, who she is. I think she's on her way to finally having an interesting career as an adult actress. I remember first seeing her in that Altman flick and thinking "Who is this person and why doesn't she have more lines?"
3. They used the RED Epic camera, which shoots at SUPER high quality (5K, which if you know anything about film processing, is more than twice what they send out for most film prints). So if the footage is "cheap-looking," it's because they made it look that way, not because they shot digital.
Oh boy, not this again: "cheap-looking digital video." It's 2013, not 2006. Fear of digital video is out, Kevin