The Intruder

A film that begins in a forest on the Swiss border of France. Louis lives alone. In a cabin with his dogs; he has no neighbours, his telephone rarely rings, and he almost never sees his son. His heart is failing. He walks, swims, rides a motorcycle, but his body no longer carries him. He decides to buy a heart. He does not wait for the official route; he gathers his money and speaks to an intermediary. From there the film becomes a journey. Korea, an operation, a period of recovery, and then an island in the Pacific. The island is Tahiti. Louis had a son there years ago and is now looking for him. He cannot find him. A contest is arranged instead; the islanders try to select a son for him, and the scene becomes an uncomfortable comedy. What the narrative is interested in is not health but debt: the man takes someone else's heart, and the film builds this as a moral rather than a medical question. The narrative is deliberately scattered. The scenes are not chronological, some are dreams, some memories, and which is which is not said. There is very little dialogue. The film gives its information not through speech but through images set beside each other. The line about his son in France hurts most. He does not know his own child, and when he goes looking years later it is too late. The source is a philosophical text. Jean-Luc Nancy wrote an essay about his own heart transplant, and the film comes out of it. Snow, sea, forest and the operating table are shot in the same rhythm; Agnès Godard was the cinematographer. Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Béatrice Dalle and Katia Golubeva are in the cast. Claire Denis directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes cinema that works through image rather than narrative. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to follow a story; the film is deliberately opaque and the order of events is never resolved.