High-Life (2018)

 

High-Life (2018)

 

Here’s a question, is Writer/Director Claire Denis more brilliant, or more frustrating?

 

She is probably France’s most admired current Director, but I must I admit of only seen her SF,F&H (so only two of her eighteen features, “Trouble Every Day (2001) and this film). She goes beyond subverting Genre Expectations, she achieves wholly new narratives when exploring the familiar Tropes. But she can also fail at the intimacy she seeks because she’s most comfortable with an Art-House archness. I say, “Trouble Every Day” is merely frustrating, but “High Life” is both frustrating and brilliant.

 

“High Life” addresses one of those questions SF prose Authors let bang around in their heads while looking for the next story, but I can’t think of another serious attempt to address it in cinema. It has to do with the Speed of Light (SoL), that speed limit that apparently is unbreakable, the Physical Law that denies us the Stars (the very closest Star is Proxima Centauri, more than 4.2 light-years away, so a hell of a one-way trip, especially since it’s unlikely our Spaceships could even reach that speed) and Time Dilation (the closer your velocity gets to the SoL, the more time slows for you, but not for those you left behind, this is also known as the Twins Paradox, where if you take a long voyage in Space, you might not age much, but your twin could grow old on Earth). Given that a round trip to almost anywhere means leaving almost all you know behind forever, and a round trip is unlikely, who the hell would do this? Denis’ answer has been used before in prose, but unique in cinema, or as a Character (who appears only in voice-over, Victor Banerjee) explains, "Radical experiments are taking place in space. Death row inmates are selected as guinea pigs ... We'll be bone dust while they're still hurtling through space."

 

Writer/Director Denis (she co-Wrote with frequent collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau along with Andrew Litvack and Geoff Cox, and acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith submitted an early, but rejected Script) is known for several things: Visual storytelling over dialogue; long-takes focusing on the faces of people hiding the truth from those around them, and even more so from themselves; Raw Sexuality which is always Perverse, even more so because it is rarely Eroticized; evading exposition even in complicated stories. For her, intensity is in stillness interrupted by shocks. “Trouble Every Day” was a SF Vampire tale, and three Characters are Scientists/Medical Doctors, but the root of the Vampirism, somehow related to their earlier Research, is never truly discussed.

 

The film opens with an Arboretum on a Spaceship known only as Number Seven, rich in its fecundity, with dewdrops on the green leaves, vegetables, and fruits, reminding us of the earlier Ecological SF Space film, “Silent Running” (1972). As the camera prowls the Ship’s corridors, this Spaceship feels abandoned except for the crying of a baby. Cut to an EVA outside a huge Spaceship, with Astronaut Monte (Robert Pattinson) being distracted from a repair job because he can hear the infant child Willow (Scarlett Lindsey, Actor Patterson’s own goddaughter and utterly adorable). There’s great tenderness in these opening scenes but also foreshadowing of dread. In a touching scene where Monte trying to give life-advice to the infant child he tries to explain “Never drink your own urine, never eat your own shit — even if they’ve been recycled [Note: Science of this film is strong in some ways, weak in others, and that piece of advice is impossible on a long Space Voyage]. It’s what we call a taboo. A taboo. Ta-boo-oo. Ta-boo … Break the laws of nature and you’ll pay for it.” Obviously, the baby can’t understand the words, it’s more a Lullaby, but there’s darker meanings within it.

 

This film is all about Taboos, our need to follow them to evade terrible Chaos, how their existence encourages Authoritarianism, how the Authoritarians violate the Taboos they enforce with ease, and how accumulating pressure will cause the Taboos to break-down so the Chaos they presumably kept at bay will likely triumph in the end. Most of the rest of the film is told in flashback. We soon learn that Monte and Willow are the last survivors of a crew of nine (Willow was not part of that original nine) and the “Radical Experiments” that the Death Row Inmates are engaging in are two-fold:

 

First was to find a way to capture the energy of a Black Hole. This is called the “Penrose Process” a theory put forward by Real-World Scientist Roger Penrose in 1969, wherein Rotational Energy could be extracted from a Black Hole by sending Particles into its Ergosphere, where they will split into two, one half will fall in while the other would escape with more energy than the original particle. This is not explained it detail during the film, and the over-all lack of Exposition seems to have freed Writer/Director Denis to employ a lot of Hard-SF, then ignore the Science, according to her whim. Unstated, but effecting the plot, is that Earth’s closest known Real-World Black Hole is Gaia BH1, approximately 1,560 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, so communication with Earth is impossible (a one-way message to Pluto, within our Solar System, takes more than five hours) and, according to Monte, “Since we left the solar system, nothing – silence.”

 

The second Experiment is to birth a healthy Human baby in Space despite the ever-present Radiation, too much for the Spaceship’s shielding to keep fully at bay.

 

Both Experiments suggest, though it is never explicitly stated, that Mother Earth is dying and desperate.

 

In these flashbacks, other memorable Characters emerge. Tchemy (André Benjamin, better known as Rapper André 3000), who is longing for Redemption but increasingly finding it a hollow exercise, though he finds some comfort in caring for the Arboretum. Boyse (Mia Goth), dangerously unstable, beautiful, but strange-looking (much like Actress Béatrice Dalle in “Trouble Everyday”), and whose apparent, mutual, Love with Monte is never expressed by either, but who bares Monte’s child Willow after Dr. Dibbs (Juliette Binoche) rapes Monte in his sleep, then inseminates Boyse against her will; Willow is the result but Dibbs withholds the truth of that union. And then there’s Dibbs, our Villain, a member of the Core-Crew, but also an Inmate, her strange half-and-half position is a signal that she’s Mad Scientist. Dibbs denies the Inmates the right of Sexual Intimacy with each other but provides them with “Fuckbox” for Autoerotic Stimulation (her own use of it is one of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes) to control their urges and extract fluids for Artificial Insemination. Monte mocks Dibbs, "It's like you've become the shaman of sperm."

 

Monte refuses to use the Fuckbox, leading Dibbs to become increasingly obsessed with him. This will set up the above-mentioned Rape, one of two in this film. We never learn what Monte’s crime was, but his refusal to provide any sperm for the Experiments strongly hints at a Discipline based on Shame. He is alternately called “the Happy Monk” or “Mr. Blue Balls.” In voice-over, he says of himself, “chastity was a way of making myself stronger.” He is our Hero, but strangely passive in the flashbacks, which are the bulk of the film’s running time; he always on the edge of cracking but never does. The first scenes offer us a better Monte than the one we see in flashback, a man who, in fatherhood, has found the only substantive Love in his life. But as Willow becomes a teenager (now played by Jessie Ross), and another Taboo hangs everything, Incest. Writer/Direct Denis never directly addresses that but dangles it for all to see (Denis is known for doing that in other films). As it’s already established Monte’s Monk-like behavior, that Taboo was likely never violated, but we must consider what role those feelings played in Monte’s final decision in the film. That finality unbearably sad, but also strangely uplifting, it is an image of Love and Choice in a context of Powerlessness and the Abyss. Denis insists that her bleak film is about “trust, fidelity and sincerity.”

 

It is Denis’ first Space film, and her first wholly in English. "I had a screenplay which was naturally in English, because the story takes place in space and, I don’t know why, but for me, people speak English — or Russian or Chinese — but definitely not French in space.” But

really, it’s a Prison film, about the Inhumanity of Confinement. As almost all the Cast of Characters were Killers before going into Space, the film doesn’t condemn the Confinement or the heavy stress on Taboos, it assumes they are inevitable, but it does challenge sustainability and practicality of Oppressive Systems, and then, frustratingly, offers no viable alternatives. The Inmate Crew (almost all of the initial nine) live through dreary, repetitive days, required daily to prove they are still alive to the Spaceships computer or Life-Support will be withheld (one must assume this data is being sent back to Earth, but will not be read for a thousand years), oppressed by rules that deeply Violate their Intimate Selves, and are kept in line by Drugs and Mechanical Distractions. The Confinement and Violations don’t work because at some point the assumption of “Correction” is reduced to nothing but a daily grind of trying to stay sane.

 

The timeframe is kept obscure, but it’s not short, not even in the Relativistic terms aboard the SPaceship. Across the film, the Cast is whittled down due to death by Natural Causes, Miscarriage, Accident, Suicide, and a few Murders. The Spaceship is increasing shabby appearing, harking back to the movie “Solaris” (1972), Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, whom Denis acknowledges was a guiding light. Production Design was by François-Renaud Labarthe, with contributions by Artist Olafur Eliasson, known for large-scale installations, and the feel is Low-Tech even though we’re looking at High-Tech. The Cinematography of  Yorick Le Saux and Tomasz Naumiuk serves that aesthetic well. The post-production FX are by Xavier Allard; they appearing only sparing throughout and suggest the more Surrealist scenes of “2001: A Space Odessey” (1968). The over-look impression is visually Retro, evoking a very different kind a Space Film and Dystopia, from pre-“Star Wars” (1977) cinema. The backwards-looking futurism effects even the music, an Electronic Score by Stuart A. Staples that is wholly up-to-date except in the gentler passages where more conventional instruments, often woodwinds, are used, and the closing credits feature the lovely, lullaby-like “Willow” written by Staples and sung by Actor Patterson.

 

The Characters, several of whom are quite unpleasant, don’t do anything Monstrous for quite some time, but the Journey is endless, and the inevitability of the coming Violence hangs over every frame. As the propose of the Mission becomes increasingly obscure to the participants the cracks, always there to see, widen. Captain Chandra (Lars Eidinger), apparently never an Inmate, has surrendered his Authority to Dibbs because he’s dying of Radiation-Induced Leukemia. Inmate/Crew Member Elektra (Gloria Obianyo) is the first to deliver a baby to term, but they both die soon after. Though Boyse’s child Willow is healthy, Boyse herself becomes increasingly unhinged, killing Pilot Nansen (Agata Buzek), another, apparent, non-Inmate, who had once defended Boyse from Rape. Boyse then steals the Space Shuttle, and in her plan-less escape, flies directly into the Black Hole and dies horribly through Spaghettification, wherein the extreme Gravitational Tidal Forces of the Black Hole pull at Boyse’s feet more than her head, elongating her body, and the two sides of her the body are compressed towards the center, which is a terrible way to go (it’s also a Real-Science Concept, but the film’s representation of it ignores the Time Dilation, so Scientifically flawed).

 

The film has enough Grotesque Violence, Perverse Sexuality, and Disgusting Fluids to be labeled Body Horror in the mode of Writer/Director David Cronenberg, but it has something else entirely unexpected, Tenderness.

 

Actor Patterson first came to notice as a Teen-Heart-Throb in the huge-popular, but justly maligned, “Twilight” film-series (first film 2008) but has since chosen work far more challenging. As Character Monte, he’s on screen for a large percentage of the running time, but even combining his dialogue and voice-voice speaks very few words. His was a part originally written for Philip Seymor Hoffman. Patterson at first seems an odd replacement for Hoffman, but Denis explained, “While I was writing the script, I had a face in mind: actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. No one has ever made me feel such a sense of humanity in them. It was something tangible. I felt I could almost touch it. And then he died [2014] … When I saw ‘Twilight,’ I liked it immediately because he [Patterson] has heartrending charisma … it would be difficult to imagine anyone more unlike Philip Seymour Hoffman physically, but Robert is very enigmatic, with a powerful presence. He gives off an aura that immediately makes you want to film him.”  Pattinson plays "a man a long way from earth. One by one, his companions die, and he survives, perhaps because he has a taciturn, monastic side to him that protects him. He will have to make decisions that affect others, not just himself ... I imagine him to be secretly hemmed in, so that even when he’s in a group, he appears to be alone, and this reserve or diffidence gives him an ability, which others don’t have, to withstand fear and pain." Over the course of the film, Character Monte goes through a profound transformation, and walks that path convincingly, without big drama or speeches. (There is big drama in this film, but Character Monte does his darndest to be one-step-outside the worse stuff).

 

Critic David Ehrich observed that Denis was, “Far more interested in the journey than the destination; more compelled by the road to nowhere than she is by nowhere itself. ‘High Life’ is fixated on the hypnotic rhythms of oblivion, and the human desires it brings to the surface.” Dennis Schwartz had a similar, but harsher, observation, “She’s more interested in the journey than the destination to nowhere, which might be a metaphor for life on Earth.” What they are both referring to was best described in 1962 by Critic Manny Farber as “Termite Art,” the bug-like immersion in a small area, a concentration on nailing down one moment, the opposite of pursuing the “White Elephant” of the grandiose.

 

Trailer:

High Life | Official Trailer HD | A24