Lori Felker: I feel that Denis is on the other side of narrative rather than in between the two categories. She takes the basic elements of narrative cinema (series of events, cause and effect), then takes out lots of the familiar entry and exit points. It occurred to me while rewatching Beau Travail and while watching The Intruder that many of her shots start in the middle of an action and end before there’s full closure.  Narrative/story/life is found in the moment of being, touching, acting—not in the explanation. I happen to be teaching a chapter from Raul Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema 2 this week. With Denis in mind, this quote jumped out at me: “Suggestion is, of course, the collection of gestures and attitudes that lead us from concealment to revelation. Truth, then, might reside in the process, in the passage from one state to the other.”

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Melika Bass: I think Denis is more interested in people than story—in creating subjective experiences through cinema. This might seem to link her to experimental film, because you could call her filmmaking intuitive. . . . She’s said in interviews that she’s interested in movement, color, sound, and how different kinds of humans live. This could describe [the perspective of] many “experimental” filmmakers, but I think Denis’s methods, subjects, scale, budget, and audience are more in line with the cinephile/art house world.

Bass: It’s hard to separate the tension we experience in viewing such an unpredictable film from what we believe the characters may be thinking or feeling. The emotion of the film is primarily inside the viewer. We assume the characters experience fear and paranoia in part because of the dread conjured by the fragmented story, but most of performances are actually quite uninflected. It’s this projecting onto the characters, and the editing that creates the emotional power of the film.

  • The Intruder

Weirdly, you remind me of Michael Bay’s mantra, “shoot for the edit,” which could be the guiding principle of much contemporary action cinema. Based on your experiences of making movies, how do you imagine she creates these juxtapositions? Do you ever feel like her concept of montage takes precedent over what she’s actually showing us?

Bass: Denis’s editing in Bastards has the same confrontational quality here as in The Intruder. There are few transitional shots between scenes, and Denis frequently takes us from a close-up of one character in one location to a close-up of another character in a completely different place. The actions don’t feel parallel or simultaneous, which is usually the effect of crosscutting. Instead, Denis creates something experiential—embodied and cognitive at the same time. Without transitions, no one is contextualized in terms of place or other characters. We’re simply put beside each person—sometimes very close—with little time to adjust or evaluate. The camera feels like a voyeur, but also like a participant. We feel somewhat complicit because we are so physically close to the events.

But what touched me is that it’s also sort of . . . it’s attractive. There wouldn’t be any news without those stories; politics are not enough. And because the economy is so bad I realized we’re getting more and more of those horrible stories as if they were nourishing something, in a world of people, not to fight against the economy, as if it were a sort of . . . sweet?”

Getting back to Faulkner, Denis has cited his novel Sanctuary as another major influence on the film. Melika, apart from its central horrific episode, what do you think the film owes to the book?

  • Chiara Mastroianni and Vincent Lindon in Bastards

  • Michel Subor as an immoral businessman in Bastards

  • Vincent Lindon in Bastards