Critics reviews

Bastards is seriously harsh stuff: The script seethes with rage at the white-collar executive-class villains behind the crime as carries a sense of helpless, free-floating frustration.

The lower light conditions also induce a high degree of grainy abstraction, and tend to bring certain colors and tonal values -- brownish-reds, hot whites, and golden yellows -- forward while cooler colors are engulfed by the swell of black. This darkness, which we have seen in films as varied in atmosphere as Friday Night, Trouble Every Day, and 35 Shots of Rum, has an unexpectedly straightforward application here, since Bastardsis as close as Denis has come to making a film noir.

Bastards is indeed a hard film to love. It's wicked, painful, and soul-sick. It's also the best new release I saw in 2013... More than anything else it's that moral distinction between despair and sorrow that makes this a Lynchian film. Darkness, nihilism, anxiety — these are relatively easy conditions to reproduce on screen. Lynch has an innate and uncanny talent for expressing the transcendent loss that inevitably accompanies violence and human tragedy. That is what Denis taps into here.

Though less formally opaque than Denis' 2004 feature, The Intruder, its terseness and sustained forward momentum will surely create questions in the minds of even the most seasoned filmgoer. While everything in this half-noir, half-Greek tragedy will be explained, Bastards is a film that begs for — and is worthy of — multiple viewings.

This puzzle of a movie... evolves into an ugly realization, an impossibility of catharsis. We drown together with the fate of the lead, and the finale (wonderfully shot in digital) overwhelms us with the realization of what we have just seen. Les Salauds is a difficult film, but an ultimately satisfying experience that puts Denis far beyond her contemporaries, a unique view still standing strong.

While Bastards, with its inky-black photography by Agnès Godard, music by Tindersticks, and murky character motivations and ill-defined relationships, is unmistakably Denis, this time I felt as though she were hovering too far above her film's messiness. The upsetting ideas it raises (about helplessness in the face of dominant male power) and devastating images it summons might require a more forthright narrative depiction than a work of circular abstraction.

The synthetic but tightly wound plot leaves a hunger for resolution, but the director, Claire Denis, instead makes familiar lurches at social critique and gender politics... Working with the cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis delivers a few shots that get at the heart of surfaces and a few closeups that conjure the heart of character; a concluding flourish evokes the heart of darkness, but scantly—the movie ends where it might have begun, and merely states mysteries that remain unexplored.

...Bastards drains away potentially valuable context in a manner that brings us closer in to the hero, intensifying our empathy with his befuddled desperation to penetrate the heart of the debasement and abuse that haunts the film like a malevolent specter.

Although it's one of her most atmospherically rich works yet, Bastards initially comes across as a minor or marginal Denis film—not a resounding statement like Beau Travail(99) or The Intruder (04), and hard to know quite where to place in her oeuvre... But even if it is merely a sketch or fragment, an elegant offhand gesture, this film is pure Denis and richly unsettling.

There's nothing wrong with dealing out a dense, noir-like plot in tiny scraps — unless, like "Bastards," the film remains flaccid and tensionless. Lindon and Mastroianni have torrid sex, then go back to glowering at one another. The film ends in a spiral of death and decadence, but the assembled puzzle is moralistic and trite; it's no kind of payoff.

If this grim tale of exploitation falls a little short of the duo's prior collaborations, it's only because peeling back its layers of misdirection proves more rewarding than seeing the big picture underneath. Yet, whileBastards is scarcely profound in its critique, aimed at powerful men who take what they want from the world, there's still a nihilistic kick to its conclusion, which recalls the bracing bleakness ofChinatown.

The film's ultimate descent feels so accelerated (by Denis standards) as to suggest a certain personal animus, a moral urgency... Denis, working with Agnès Godard, has always had one of the most distinctive visual rhythms in cinema, musical and bodily, but a hard steadiness creeps into Bastards. It's a movie ultimately epitomized by a Cocteauvian twist on the noir motif of driving in a speeding car, lost in the night—j'ai pas sommeil indeed.