Directed by Claire Denis
Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau
Starring Robert Pattinson, Mia Goth, Juliette Binoche, and Andre Benjamin
High Life is a dirge. That isn't to say that it's a bad film and it is certainly too rich to throwaway as being "interesting."
I think back to Gravity-- a film only similar on a surface level-- which I wrote with my hands still shaking from the experience and I am writing about High Life only having just walked out of it. In the case of Gravity I hadn't had a chance to come down off of the high of watching that movie. In the case of High Life, it is a movie that I am still digesting. That I'm not sure how I feel about it or that I'll ever really know how I feel about it.
But I doubt confusion bordering on ambivalence is what Claire Denis was going for when she set out to make this movie (a story that she had wanted to tell for going on fifteen years, apparently).
Or maybe not. I can't say that I know too much about Claire Denis (and that's on me).
That it accomplishes a consistent funereal tone might be what makes it worth while and it might be why I'd tell you to miss it entirely. It isn't a whole lot of fun.
That said, it's a film with a few stand out sequences that I probably won't stop thinking about until the day I die. There's a big one towards the beginning of the film (if you've seen it, yes, it's the one you're thinking of), but there are also a lot of little moments. Strange, flitting moments in the memories of these characters that are beautiful and haunting and are as relatable as they are alien. There is a flashback of Monte (Robert Pattinson) walking through the woods with his dog. There is Boyse (Mia Goth) living as a rail-borne tramp back on Earth. There is a completely out-of-the-blue sequence in which a guru (I think?) talks to a French student about the premise of the film. Each of these scenes are so light and so out of the blue that you can't help but feel that they must have meaning. Little brush strokes of color in the middle of all of this gloom that feel like real art. That somebody has something to say. And then you go back to Monte and his crew slowly succumbing to space madness and you know that there is something here, but you just can't say what it is.
This takes two hours. I wish I could be more definitive about how I feel about the movie. It sucked. It rocked. It was a thrill ride. Whatever. But taking something like that-- especially as of this moment-- and distilling it down to five hundred words seems. . . Vulgar? Low? High Life has too much going on for me to treat it like that.
Like the movie, me feeling on it are a mystery, even to myself. I can't say that it's an entirely enjoyable feeling. What I can say is that it is cinema and looking around at movies these days and at the world in general, I think we could us more things like that.
James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and has had enough of regular old Earth madness, thank you very much. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.
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