‘Da-da.” “Ta-boo.” These two words are spoken early on in Claire Denis’s singular head-trip through the cosmos, from a father to his infant daughter. He’s teaching her the building blocks of our existence as Homo sapiens: the biological, expressed as the genetic bonds linking progenitor and progeny, and the sociological, represented by the arbitrary precepts ruling what is and is not natural. These oppositional forces – the organic inclination of the body, and the ego’s drive to pervert it – are locked in a tug-of-war aboard the orbiting station that sets the scene for this space odyssey, in which both the god-given and manmade aspects of personhood start to break down.
The facility has been designed as a prison, a holding cell for death-row inmates enrolled in a programme through which they conduct perilous black hole explorations in exchange for commuted sentences. Abandoned by earthbound society and forgotten by time, they have in many senses let themselves go; the mad Dr Dibs (Juliette Binoche) allows her hair to grow into an anaconda of a French braid, while Tcherny (André Benjamin) spends all of his waking hours in the self-sustaining garden. To maintain his sanity, our protagonist Monte (Robert Pattinson, perhaps the best performance of his career) has done just the opposite, holding himself to a monk-like standard of asceticism. Despite all of Dr Dibs’ attempts to extract semen from him for her depraved experiments, he remains steadfastly celibate, having boiled his sense of personal agency down to the power to procreate (or not).
The proper functioning of the reproductive process emerges as the closest thing this film has to dramatic stakes, positing copulation, gestation, lactation and a handful of other -ations as clinical trials establishing what it means to be human. Any reading of the film will start with the ability to create and sustain new life, but from there Denis leaves a lot of room for interpretation. She assembles images that provoke awe while confounding easy comprehension, at times leaving her audience to bask in the raw power of such scenes as the one that sends the suicidal Boyse (Mia Goth) to her oblivion by spaghettification. Or the showstopping set piece in which Dr Dibs strips nude, mounts a phallic metallic contraption referred to as “the fuckbox,” and desperately straddles it in a passage unrivalled this year for pure poeticism.
Even in their inscrutability, both sequences speak to a quality of accessibility heretofore largely alien to Denis’s cerebral canon. The production design borrows from HR Giger’s famed techno-corridors, and her engagement with the tropes of sci-fi can give the film the feel of a popcorn blockbuster from a parallel dimension. High Life is perhaps the most intellectually beguiling and definitely the most gratuitously entertaining of the French master’s films. It is an epochal achievement that challenges the future of its genre to chart new horizons and plumb new depths.
