Every auteur should make a film about desperadoes locked in a cramped tin
can of a space ship. The restriction crystallizes the vision and discipline needed for surviving such a project -- for characters and filmmaker alike.
It reminds us of what is essential, what can be pared down. What Denis
strips out are her excessive nihilism (_The Bastards_) and intellectualizing (_Let the Sunshine In_) of recent years. _High Life_ is a return to
the spare, mostly wordless visual poetry of vintage Denis, from _Chocolate_
to _L'Intrus_; the 70+ year-young director is even inspired to put in
arguably the first optimistic (if highly ambiguous) ending in her oeurve.

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Also for the first time in Denis' career, her film features a non-linear timeline. Yet the story-telling is a paragon of clarity. A crew of
convicts are recruited to explore a black hole near the solar system. It is
a near-light-speed, one-way trip; by the time they arrive the human race
would have aged, perhaps expired. The callow youths -- half boys, half
girls, mostly murderers -- are led by Juliette Binoche's Dr. Dips alongside a ship captain so anonymous he barely registers. They grow crops, do physical exercises, are experimented on by Dips who wants to create "perfect babies." Four years and halfway into the journey, the ship decelerates and the crew start to lose their purpose. Madness sets in. A manned black-hole probe
fails fatally, and they perish one by one, leaving Monte (Robert Pattison)
to raise the surviving baby, his daughter Willow. She grows into a lovely teenager played by Jessie Ross. Years later they breach the event
horizon of another black hole, meeting an unknown, perhaps hopeful fate.

_High Life_ is a tone poem. Poetry functions via allusions, they conjure ghosts from our past, and _High Life_ effortlessly evokes iconic science fiction films even as it surpasses them. The Star Child Willow is Denis, cowriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, and Geoff Cox's humanistic answer to _2001: A
Space Odyssey_, overriding Arthur C. Clarke's deus ex machina human
embryo created by aliens with the real article bred and raised year after painstaking year. The low tech blackholes, beautiful as alligators eyes,
trump the lavish special effects in _Interstellar_. Robert Pattison's
zen-like calm also outshines the hyperventilating McConaughay, although I
wish Jessica Chastain would enroll in a _High Life_ sequel. Other critics
have mentioned _High Life_ in the same breathe as Tarkovsky, _Alien 3_.
The film is also a summation of Denis' own brilliant career. The camaraderie and barely suppressed tension among the multicultural convicts evoke the Legionnaries of _Beau Travails_; Monte's devotion to his baby girl recalls Boni's painful fetishizing of newborns in _Nenette and Boni_. Juliette Binoche's long-haired witch of a fertility doctor is Beatrice Dalle's vampiric Core (_Trouble Every Day_)/brazen Queen of the North in _L'Intrus_. Denis showcases the great French actress in so many unforgettable scenes (writhing naked in the ship's fornication box; floating out of the airlock like a
drowned Ophelia ..), this will be looked upon as one of her greatest roles.

While Denis' frequent collaborator Agnes Godard does not man the camera (she
is replaced by Yorick Le Saux and Tomasz Naumiuk), the film luxuriates in
the director's trademark tactile close-ups on bodies and faces. The warm
hues used to light the living quarters and the lush green in the garden hold
at bay the bleak inhumanity of outer space. More than ever before, Denis' camera moves like ghosts, bypassing not just doorways but chronology. One moment Andre Benjamin's Tcherny is lying on his favorite spot in the garden, musing that he prefers to return to earth rather than have his body shoved
out the airlock. In the next shot years have passed, he has indeed melted
into a mound of dirt, his sneakers and wild flowers on his grave the only reminders of his existence.

The self-effacing Benjamin unmistakably evokes Denis' frequent actor Alex Descas. Pattison also proves a worthy Denis protagonist; his Monte is like
a monk (even if he neither reads nor prays), practising abstinence and self-discipline as if to atone for his killing of a young girl over the drowning of a dog. Speaking of dogs, there have not been so many allusions
to canines since _L'Intrus_. The daily report to earth they have to file to gain another 24 hours of life-support is called "feeding the dog." Late
in the film Monte and daughter come across a flying shoebox just like theirs, only there are only stray dogs inside; the human operators have presumably killed themselves long ago. This time Monte leaves the animals behind
and returns to his young female companion, unobtrusively completing his arc
of redemption.

The two well-heeled characters Monte and Tcherny anchor the center in this microcosm of our civilization. Birth, death, regeneration, verdant garden, sterile infinite space are concisely touched upon within 5 minutes of the film's beginning. The rapes, murders, postpartum depression, and plain
ennui that slowly decimate the crew are balanced by the two's tolerance and humility. (Mia Goth, who could be a younger Yekaterina Golubeva (the angel
of death in _L'Intrus_), gives a particularly compelling portrait of a feral youth imploding under the strain.) Here is where Denis' humanistic vision far outstrips anti-bourgeois dystopia tales like Hanake's _Time of the Wolve_ and countless low-budget post-apocalyptic films where men resort to cannabalism. Denis, who admits to being a wild child in a NY Times interview with Barry Jenkins, has always sided with the demimonde. Here she treats her convicts
in all their frailty and physicality -- sweat, blood, semen, and breastmilk
-- with supreme empathy, not revulsion or judgement. The respect Monte
shows their bodies during the space burial scene is bracing to watch. The
film ends on a hopeful tone, with a hymn-like lullaby sung by Pattison as
he and Willow open the hatch of their probe and heads to an unknown future.
It may merely his death-dream, but somehow feels more like a hard-earned prayer.

(for A.)

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