Les salauds par Claire Denis (review)

Reviews 203 cinématographique“durassienne”en transposant la méthode ethnocritique des années 1990 à ce nouveau champ et analyse “le nœud du texte et du film, de l’image et de la voix, le cœur de l’intrigue”(111) dans Mains négatives (1979). Coureau applique cette méthode à d’autres courts métrages de Duras, dont Césarée (1979) et Aurélia Steiner (1979) tout en insistant sur la dimension d’ordre sacrificiel du devenir-juif de l’auteure (133). Bergala évoque à son tour le concept de réinvention du cinéma et établit la fonction de “l’image noire” en tant qu’objet de réflexion dans L’homme atlantique (1981) et émetteur d’absence de la figure masculine située hors de l’écran (145). Enfin, Roceray élargit l’utilisation du procédé cinématographique de “délocalisation” à des réalisateurs internationaux, dont Stan Brakhage, João César Monteiro ou David Wharry dans les années 2000, et conclut que “les écrans noirs, [...] invitent à la matérialisation d’images et participent à leur vision: ils deviennent matière pour la pensée en tant que pause, respiration, mais aussi liant entre les photogrammes composés d’images”(157–58). Dans un plaidoyer basé sur trois entretiens qui servent d’épilogue, Cléder lance le ton pour une défense de cette immense artiste versatile. Outre la réception problématique de certains courts et longs métrages, ces trois entrevues concourent à montrer la modernité de Duras et apportent des réponses directes aux questions que les chercheurs adressent dans ce collectif. Huston-Tillotson University (TX) Anne Cirella-Urrutia Denis, Claire, réal. Les salauds. Int. Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille. Alcatraz, 2013. The opening sequences appear to contain the film’s premise: Sandra’s husband has committed suicide, her family’s business in shoe manufacturing teeters on bankruptcy , and her daughter Justine has been hospitalized with injuries from violent sexual abuse. Édouard Laporte, a wealthy, ruthless financier, it seems, is to blame. The only person Sandra can turn to for help is her brother Marco, a ship captain away at sea. Upon receiving word of the family tragedy (which his shipmate translates erroneously—yet more aptly in terms of the film’s storyline—as “family business”), Marco abandons his ship to save his family. Fast-forward to Paris one month later: the unemployed ship captain moves into a high-rent apartment which happens to be in the same building where Laporte keeps his young mistress Raphaëlle and their son Joseph. That Marco, a divorced man with childcare payments to make, could justify plotting revenge is hard to imagine, even more so when he severed ties with the family and the family business long ago and knows“little about them.”So when Marco’s focus shifts from making Laporte pay for his crimes to seducing Laporte’s mistress, viewers should start to question not only Marco’s sense of family responsibility but his other motives as well.Right after his first disturbingly brutish sexual encounter with Raphaëlle, for example, Marco liquidates his life insurance to finance a yearlong“sabbatical”from work, unfazed by an insurance agent’s stern reminder that he had taken the policies out to guarantee financial support for his two young daughters in the event of his untimely death. In the following scene, Sandra watches contentedly as her big brother takes clear satisfaction in writing out checks to cover his little sister’s debt even as he suspects Sandra of withholding information about how Laporte truly figures into her financial situation and Justine’s traumatic injuries. Marco’s suspicions are confirmed when he obtains a surveillance photo that shows Justine, her father, and Laporte entering a place Marco recognizes because Sandra led him there previously, a venue used by powerful men paying top dollar to watch or participate in sordid criminal sex fantasies that are sometimes filmed. At this point, the object of revenge that Marco originally envisioned comes completely undone, to be cruelly reconfigured in the final scene of Les salauds, in a piece of grainy footage that shows Laporte watching as Justine’s father rapes her...