High Life

Juliette Binoche channels her inner cowgirl in High Life

An uningratiating film, Claire Denis' High Life is a space picture that is more an investigation of our species than of space itself. The first part of the film centers on Robert Pattinson's Monte, adrift in a spaceship with a baby girl. We initially see him dispose of the bodies of the ship's inhabitants and then see in a series of flashbacks see how they met their demise. We learn, from a clumsy insert, that Monte and his cohorts are death row convicts enrolled in a doomed deep space mission. Juliette Binoche plays an onboard doctor conducting fertility experiments. The third act concerns Monte and the now tween girl as they drift through space.

Fetishism is the dominant thematic fixation of Denis in High Life; redolent of Cronenberg. The trapped convicts stroke their hair, their genitals and, especially, their scars as they get buggy during their confinement. These are the only objects with which they can find meaning as they hurtle towards oblivion. Pattison and Binoche are wonderful embodiments of, respectively, passivity and barely controlled hysteria. The convicts, damaged to begin with, grow agitated in space and are soon picking at each other. Denis stresses the need for tactile gratification with large closeups of hand holding and digits digging the dirt. A prime example of Ms. Denis' work.