Robert Pattinson as Monte in Claire Denis' HIGH LIFE. Photo courtesy TIFF.
Is there anything worse than being stranded in space subject to the incessant screaming of a baby? Answer: Space rape. Processing all 110 minutes of Claire Denis’ sex-crimes-in-outer-space drama, HIGH LIFE, in the era of #MeToo is a close third.
Robert Pattinson plays Monte, one among several criminals aboard a spacecraft marooned many light years from Earth on a trajectory toward… that’s just it. Denis, whose CHOCOLAT won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1988, relies here on her status as a celebrated director to escape conventions and get away with it. Except she doesn’t.
The film attempts sophistication through unnecessary, incoherent, narrative jumbling (opening on the disposing of bodies, the reasons for their death which we learn afterward), yet relies on expository dialogue to bring us up to speed. If the convicts co-operate with experiments connected to a mission to explore a black hole, they’re promised an extension of resources necessary for survival, e.g. oxygen.
Patricia Arquette reportedly dropped out of the project in late 2017, leaving no one else to anchor this aimless and tone-deaf picture. As a critic I’m supposed to defend the new, but is Mia Goth’s entire reason for being there because she starred in Von Trier’s NYMPHOMANIAC; Is that the… joke? Only Pattinson, who won accolades for his performance in last year’s critical favorite GOOD TIME, is a native English-speaker. So it makes the acting imbalance difficult to judge.
Though no reason was given for Arquette’s departure, I suspect it had to do with the optics of participating in a film that does little to dispel stereotypes about rape. As part of the experiment, Dibs (Binoche), ties down and sedates the women, and lets Ettore (Ewan Mitchell) run loose. His rape of Boyse (Mia Goth) is brutal, a show of power—reinforced by the steep camera angles. However, Dibs’ rape of Monte is shot in flat close-ups with the kinetics coming from Binoche’s writhing body, suggesting something more sensual or erotic, ignoring or obscuring the non-consenting individual she’s straddling.
I’ve no idea what rape and artificial insemination have to do with spacetime and, it seems, neither does Denis. It’s clear that Denis had, at least vaguely, wanted to examine the erosion of humanity in claustrophobic conditions, but she ham-fists out that tune monophonically—death, rape, violence, paternalistic love. Say what you will about Kubrick’s interstellar cop-out; the difference is he didn’t even bother with the appearance of a story. Between grief and nothing, etc.
