Tropic Sprockets / High Life

By Ian Brockway

 

French auteur Claire Denis (Beau Travail) directs a vexing yet intriguing science fiction character study in “High Life.” The film is sure to have its detractors, but its haunt is in the details: a baby surrounded by video screens, a sneaker encrusted in mud, or endless eerie corridors overtaken by curling fog like cascades of human hair.

Though the film turns the idea of solitude into an endurance test and precious little happens for a good quarter of the film, this is the point and Denis is rightly deliberate.

This is outer space and Monte (Robert Pattinson) is a convicted murderer from death row, liberated to go on a space voyage. He has an infant daughter that he was tricked into conceiving by the manipulations of the harsh criminal Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche). There is not much for Monte to do except for his daily chores (which are considerable) and re-live his painful past.

Monte’s last hope is his daughter, the only element in his life that keeps him going.

Monte is not an utterly bad person, though he is certainly not good. He killed his girlfriend over an altercation with a dog which resulted in the dog’s death. One gets the idea that Monte’s biggest fault is his passivity coupled with bouts of violence, and that he is a statistic, one of the many (at least for a time) who have slipped and become undesirable.

Through flashbacks, Monte is with a group of young prisoners—-men and women—all under the mercurial whim of a driven doctor with a fertility fetish.

The film excels in its striking detail. Floating bodies suspended in the dark emptiness have all of the impact of a sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky.

Evocative too is the shot of the baby daughter watching the slaughter of a Native American as he turns into a pillar of smoke, overwhelmed and crying, perhaps in tribute to the iconic 1971 commercial “Keep America Beautiful.”

The film has substantial input from Danish artist Ólafur Elíasson (known for his huge geometric sculptural forms) who designed the Bauhaus like penal ship while it also has excellent eerie cinematography by Yorick Le Saux (Only Lovers Left Alive).

Yet for its excellence, “High Life” has the dubious distinction of being the least sexy film since Ken Russell’s “Crimes of Passion.” Dr. Dibs killed her children and all of her screaming while copulating with metal machinery is enough to put anyone off of romantic pursuits for a month.

The element of semen possesses the corrosive weirdness of a film by David Cronenberg. The male fluid has the import of a sacred voodoo rite.

Though surely not for everyone, “High Life” captures the isolation of space exceedingly well with echoes of Kubrick’s “2001” and Duncan Jones’s “Moon.”

While the story is witchy and vampirish with its emphasis on blood and semen, all the poetry that is necessary involves a baby reaching out for a strawberry deep in the engineered soil, blissful despite the circumstance that we are all (whether prisoner or citizen) actually adrift in space.

Write Ian at [email protected]

 

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