Les salauds (Bastards), France 2013. Directed by Claire Denis. Vancity Theatre Nov. 22-28. Rating: 8 (out of 10)
Trapped in a life he didn’t choose, Marco Silvestri (Vincent Landon) tries to make things better in French filmmaker Claire Denis’ new film noir Les salauds (Bastards).
Like a modern-day Charle Bronson in Paris, Marco aims to set things straight but has come rather late to the game. Landon is surrounded by an excellent cast (including Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille and Lola Creton) who hinder or help his efforts to understand a corrupt world.
Denis, a consummate stylist, based her film on the sense of doom she found in William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary. The southern author, a favourite of Denis, was the subject of a lecture the French filmmaker gave in 2011, Faulkner’s Cinematic Novels, as part of a course she taught at the European Graduate School.
Faulkner spent time in Hollywood as a scriptwriter hanging out with the likes of Dashiell Hammett and his southern gothic novel Pylon was the template for Douglas Sirk’s 1957 masterwork The Tarnished Angels, which featured Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone in the cast. In Les salauds Denis employs plenty of signifiers linking her noir esthetic with the Hollywood milieu of Hammett and Raymond Chandler as well as the pop culture fascination of 1960s Godard films.
The storyline takes us into dark realms that classic film noir of the ’30s and ’40s only hinted at. There is little lightness in Denis’ nightmarish tale with the camera following lives as they unravel.
Les salauds features a superb soundtrack from Tindersticks who have worked with Denis on many of her films. The moody electronic material weaves in and out of the narrative seamlessly with a Handsome Furs-like cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Put Your Love in Me” opening and closing the film.
