Closer to Humanity, Further from Earth: Claire Denis’ High Life

(Please enjoy this post from guest author Tenzytile. – Ed)

French director Claire Denis, celebrated since her feature debut in 1988, has become something of a stalwart in the festival scene. Her work, diverse, but often focused on the enigmatic importance of human interaction and always illustrated by insightful, sensation-driven performances and visual strategies, has earned her a faithful critical following which has upheld her for decades as one of the greatest filmmakers alive, a notion that only seems to grow truer as time goes on. Despite her reputation, her name is not as widely recognized as many other international filmmakers of similar stature, which could be for any number of reasons, the most reasonable of which being that she’s worked exclusively in the French language. Her latest film, High Life, could have been something of a late-career breakout: a science fiction film in the English language with an international cast (including popular figures like Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth, and Andre Benjamin), and distributed by growing favourite A24 in America.

Director and co-writer Claire Denis

Denis has riffed on popular film genres before, with her take on horror with Trouble Every Day or with Bastards, which is something of a modern noir; but these films are perhaps most exceptional in the ways they upset or avoid adhering to the formulas of their given genres. High Life, by contrast, is a full embrace of sci-fi, and it’s also a prison film—which is a pseudo-genre itself. It’s about prisoners being sent into space for the purposes of experimentation. The manner of this experimentation is twofold: they are being sent to gather information on black holes, and they’re also the subject of experiments involving fertilization in space conditions; inner and outer space. These prisoners, though not all given coherent backstories, are seemingly all violent criminals off of death row and life sentences. Even the ship’s doctor and foremost authority, played by Binoche, murdered her family; and her obsession with fertility seems to be driven partly by the loss and guilt of having smothered her own children. The film focuses on Monty (Pattinson) a prisoner whose quiet, resistant nature provides a means of survival and eventually a child to take care of. As the setup or the inherent qualities of the genres being accessed here would imply, the voyage turns into a real mess. It’s possible that the mess it turns into is a third kind of experiment for the people back on Earth.

It’s a strange setup, but science fiction films have a long history of being accepted and celebrated for their strangeness, with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey being a crown jewel for the medium. What strikes me most about High Life’s place in the cinematic sci-fi canon is its surprising originality. Though one could thoughtfully compare it to other works in film history, it’s remarkably distinct conceptually and stylistically. It even avoids the weirdly common trap in filmic science fiction of referencing the atmospheric seafaring fiction of Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville (it should be noted that Denis has adapted Melville before, with Beau Travail). There are a myriad of technological and conceptual strings that set this film apart from other recent science fiction. For example, the design of the central ship is certainly unique, recalling older spacecraft and opting for a boxier, structuralist look, which seems appropriate given that none of them are ever meant to land on anything. Early on, its manner of their space-flight is explained: the ship travels a speed a little slower than light. The crew stands together watching through a skylight at the top/front of the ship (it travels upwards by design, the force of movement providing a sense of gravity) and watch as light passes by them slowly. Monty speaks in voice over: “…the sensation of moving backwards, even though we’re moving forwards”. The arrangement of the characters, looking upwards at this phenomenon implies another dimension: the sense of sinking while rapidly ascending; a metaphor that works for not just their personal fates, but also the concept of the creating such a doomed space program in the first place. Denis creates several of these imaginative sci-fi spaces in fantastic circumstances, which range from a cramped vessel approaching a black hole, to the interior of a machine designed to provide sexual pleasure (affectionately called the ‘Fuck Box’), and even another spacecraft under its own almost otherworldly sense of duress.

Denis also uses this sci-fi concept to more meaningfully connect a topic that has gone mostly unexplored in her previous films: that of religion. There are several metaphorical allusions to religious imagery and doctrine, like the Edenic garden in the spacecraft, Monty’s monk-like lifestyle, and the plot focus on an immaculate child, which are all interesting to consider. It’s likely a more studied viewer in religious imagery could take more away from its several references, but there is one scene entirely devoted to religious dogma, and it’s one directly related to the technology of the spacecraft. In the ship, there is a monitor playing footage broadcasted from Earth: documentary footage old and new without any overt message: silent footage of a volcanic reaction and what appears to be a large sports game, for example. Monty’s daughter, at this point a teenager, faces the screen with her palms pressed together in a praying pose. When Monty asks her what she’s doing, she responds that she wants to feel what they (the people back on Earth) feel. Again, this ties back into a pursuit of humanity in Claire Denis’ cinema. She prays not to be brought closer to God, but to be brought closer to humanity, which at this point is probably further away.

Yet despite being an exceptionally crafted, original science-fiction feature in English with recognizable talent, High Life didn’t find an audience. Its trailer on Youtube has more views than it received dollars in its worldwide box office take. A naive answer would point to its marketing campaign; but while a better (more expensive) strategy could have pulled in more viewers, the reason why it didn’t catch on is because, for all of its differences from the rest of Claire Denis’ work, despite its genre and cast and spoken language, it’s still a Claire Denis film. It is simply not accessible for general moviegoers. The broader aspects were not a means of becoming more marketable (that would simply be a happy side-effect). Denis instead uses these facets as tools to both invigorate and explode so many of the thematic and aesthetic concerns she’s pursued her entire career.

For example, as a director, Denis has never shied away from violence, openly pursuing it in films like her cock-fighting drama No Fear No Die, or her disturbing drama about sexual violence, Trouble Every Day, in which people are overtaken by cannibalistic urges when they become aroused. It’s actually Trouble Every Day that High Life has the most in common with in subject and tone, with a similar interest in sexual violence and concerning, off-kilter rhythms and imagery. High Life doesn’t tackle its sexual violence in uncomfortable and messy scenes of grandiose violence, but through its genre—more clinically, both in arrangement and representation. There are three rapes in the film, all in the beds of the prisoners, all in the same part of the identical rooms: the single bed opposite the bunk pair, situated on the right hand side of the cell. These rapes are progressively less violent: the first is an assault, one that terrifyingly turns its attention to two other women trying to stop it; the second is the rape of a man who’s been sedated both for the physical gratification of the doctor and to forcibly extract semen; the third is the rape of a sedated woman by way of a forced artificial insemination. By arranging these assaults in the same visual space, Denis is calling attention to the increasing moral ambiguity of these actions, as they move away from dark human impulse into almost darker, exacting human logic. I’d imagine that many audience members wouldn’t think of the third scene as a rape given its matter-of-fact and nonviolent delivery, but the spacial and circumstantial echoes are too strong to ignore. That the first scene ends in a death and the third in conception, seems to feed into the churning moral, human centre of the film, which is consistently pitting life against certain death and hope against certain doom.

Denis uses the environments of a spacecraft to reimagine another one of the most potent motifs in her filmography: loving father-daughter relationships, which builds the core of this film and a few of her others (like L’Intrus, her most abstract film, and 35 Shots of Rum, her loving ode to the films of Yasujiro Ozu). Monty’s relationship with his daughter is always one of contrast; the contrast between bodies, the pair and their environment, and the love of their relationship with the violence and exploitation of the adult conflicts in the rest of the film. Pattinson’s performance is especially strong here, exuding a tenderness he hasn’t shown in other roles, and Denis’ camera captures their relationship with attention and sensitivity. A short sequence of Monty teaching his daughter to walk is incredible; watching their feet, how his boots slowly waddle forward and her feet drag between steps before finding their soles, naked against the tiled floor. Science fiction is often its most potent at its most human, and few directors are as committed to human interaction as Denis is.

But for how thoughtful and well-crafted it is a science fiction story, and for how typically artful it is as a Claire Denis film, there are missteps in High Life: some structural issues and pieces that fail to coalesce. For how surprising and peculiar High Life can be on a scene to scene level, it’s actually rather rigid in its overall structure. There are three distinct movements: the first entailing life between Monty and his infant daughter immediately after the deaths of the rest of the crew, the middle section set beforehand and devoted to the fate of the crew, and the third section resuming the relationship between Monty and his daughter many years later. The first and third sections are more free-form, and the middle section is much more linear and conventional—and the lines between these sections, their arrangement, their length, and how they contrast one another feels a bit cumbersome. In a film so full of ideas and so wonderfully executed on a technical level, arranging the story in a way that appears to be for the sake of contrast (the contrast between the exploitational system and people of the mid-section with the freedom and tenderness of the bookending sections) speaks to a faint insecurity that’s atypical of Denis’ work. An entirely linear arrangement or a wholly Proustian one rather than a segmented combination would have been more effective and coherent.

High Life also has an occasional problem with dialogue, which may be a byproduct of it being a work in a language secondary to its creator and some of its cast members. For example, there’s a scene set on Earth early on (the only scene on Earth that isn’t a memory of one of its central characters), in which two characters on a train, a reporter and a professor, spout expositional dialogue about the space program. It’s poorly performed and implemented, and contains information that could have been inferred from the rest of the film. Other scenes aren’t nearly as clumsy, but they do occasionally fall into didacticism. Denis’ films rarely put an emphasis on dialogue (her previous film, Let the Sunshine In is a major exception), and like the decisions made regarding the film’s larger editing decisions, a less forceful approach may have yielded stronger or more thought-provoking results given the strength of the rest of the material.

These flaws do not seriously mar the film, and in some cases may actually help some audience members along, but they are out of step with and overwhelmed by the success of so many other bold aesthetic and conceptual decisions. They’re the byproduct of a great director working in a new realm, a circumstance that doesn’t often lead to films as good as this one. High Life is a brave, seriously memorable work of filmic science fiction, which is all the more valuable in an era of science fiction ideas being sidelined by sci-fi fantasy plots and franchising.