Bastards

An often excruciatingly tedious endeavor, Bastards details the relationship that ensues between two individuals (Vincent Lindon’s Marco and Chiara Mastroianni’s Raphaëlle) after a mutual friend passes away. Filmmaker Claire Denis does a nice job of initially drawing the viewer into the deliberately-paced proceedings, as Bastards opens with a relatively compelling stretch detailing Raphaëlle’s reaction to the suicide of her husband – although it’s clear even during this pre-credits sequence that Denis isn’t looking to deliver a straightforward piece of work (ie what’s up with the naked woman wandering the streets?) The movie subsequently segues into a progressively infuriating midsection that’s rife with unexplained and thoroughly baffling elements, as Denis and cowriter Jean-Pol Fargeau suffuse the picture with a series of confusing character developments and headscratching plot twists – which ensures that the viewer spends most of Bastards‘ increasingly interminable running time asking a barrage of questions (eg who is this naked woman? why is she wandering around nude? what is the relationship between the two protagonists? etc, etc). And although some of the movie’s more incomprehensible aspects are eventually made clear, Bastards has long-since completely alienated and pushed away the viewer to an absolutely irreversible degree (ie it’s utterly impossible to care once Denis starts filling in the various blanks) – with the end result an aggressively pretentious art-house disaster generally devoid of redeeming qualities.

1/2* out of ****