With the films of Claire Denis describing the plot isn’t the best way to get an idea of what they are about. Much more important than plot are the characters and the settings that they are in. With The Intruder Denis establishes the characters in a leisurely and beautiful way while leaving large gaps in what we see that the viewer needs to fill in for themselves. We’re left to make the connections between what we see and hear in the film and while it never is neatly tied up, it is the beauty of the images and the simplicity of what we see that kept me engrossed in a film that involves characters with mysterious motives, a man needing a heart transplant and the journey that he takes as he searches for a heart and his son.

When the film festival programmer herself introduces the film as “frustrating” and “resists interpretation,” well, consider yourself warned. And while I usually relish a fun mindbender of a film, there’s little pleasure (at least right now) to be derived from this exercise, especially since one is teased - constantly - with the possibility that some form of coherence is just a few minutes away, just another plot twist around the corner. (The images are indeed beautiful - the wintry French landscape, the colored ribbons at the christening of a Korean ship, the purple sky behind Tahitian coconut trees - and so is the music, by Stuart Staples from the Tindersticks.)

We follow the travels of Michel Subor, the recipient of a seemingly illegal heart transplant, from France to Korea to Tahiti, where he is, ostensibly, looking for his son. Or something like that. He may be a retired secret agent. Or not. Throughout there are quick intimations of violence, as if the film is threatening to become a spy flick. (I think the nods to the thriller genre were what threw me off; had it been a film about, for instance, a grieving couple wandering the streets of Hiroshima, I would have been more receptive to the cinematic logic.)

But one by one, the little plot threads are dropped: the foreign passports, the heart in the snow, money from a Swiss bank, the Russian agent following him. It is as if what passes for narrative convention is slowly stripped off, layer by layer, until we are left with nothing but the ocean (perhaps as much a symbol of eternal longing here as it is in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). (There is a semblance of circularity toward the end - I can’t spoil it - but logically, at least in terms of physical logic, it makes little sense.)

Maybe some dreamwork tonight will help me figure it out, but for now… I am indeed frustrated, as the festival programmer rightly predicted. Especially frustrated, since there was a Puffy Amiyumi concert just next door.

With the qualifier that I’m a sucker for slow movies that leave plenty of space for the audience to fill in, I have to say that this was a strange and wonderful movie to watch. Enigmatic and self-contradictory, it gives only enough dialogue to suggest a narrative thread, and relies on pure cinematography and indistinct dream sequences to imply much of the drama. It’d be easy to criticize the movie for having virtually no story at all. Yet I found myself reluctant to take a bathroom break for the entire two hours and ten minutes, fearing that I’d miss even one of the brief, suggestive scenes that all seemed to be integral pieces of a large and magical puzzle. While that greater whole never came together coherently, I didn’t much care, I was riveted. Meanwhile, half the audience was sleeping. To each their own.