The last time French auteur Claire Denis dipped her toe into genre-filmmaking, we got the disturbing, bizarre and brilliant Trouble Every Day, a riff on vampire stories closer to something like Martin than Twilight. Now she’s returned to the realm of the speculative with the first teaser for High Life, a Robert Pattinson-starring sci-fi drama that looks like the anti-First Man.
Where Pattinson’s deadpan, drawled narration here talks of a mission into space to study the gravitational pull of a black hole or something (what is this, Interstellar?), the snippets of films we actually see suggest a different focus. He and his fellow crewmates are considered “trash” — Mia Goth and former half of Outkast André Benjamin amongst them — and subsequently subject to the experiments of a doctor played by Juliette Binoche.
Binoche starred in Denis’s last film, Let the Sunshine In, a mature, cynical romantic dramedy about a middle-aged woman looking for love in all the wrong places — such as an investment banker whose chauvinism meant she could only orgasm by thinking about what a bastard he was.
It looks like we’re back in the realm of unhappy couplings and the bleak comedy of human relationships with High Life. We see Pattinson cradling a baby, Goth lamenting the fact that she can’t have children, and at least two lights-out hook-ups of questionable consent.
We also see lots of imagery that recalls seventies science fiction classics, including the retro-styled hallways and space suits of Tarkovsky’s Solaris and a garden that has to be a conscious throwback to Bruce Dern’s hippies-beyond-the-stars feature Silent Running.
Here’s the official synopsis, in case you’re not already on board for this mission
Deep space. Beyond our solar system. Monte and his infant daughter Willow live together aboard a spacecraft, in complete isolation. A solitary man, whose strict self-discipline is a protection against desire –his own and that of others– Monte fathered the girl against his will. His sperm was used to inseminate Boyse, the young woman who gave birth to her. They were members of a crew of prisoners: space convicts, death row inmates. Guinea pigs sent on a mission to the black hole closest to Earth. Now only Monte and Willow remain. And Monte is changed. Through his daughter, for the first time, he experiences the birth of an all-powerful love. Willow grows, becoming a young girl, then a young woman.
Sounds weird! Sounds like a Claire Denis movie!
High Life will be released sometime in 2019.
