“I wanted the film to be dark, to be nocturnal, and with the RED Epic, this darkness is not an easy thing, because it’s a camera that sees everything,” Claire Denis recently told us while discussing the switch to digital for her latest film, Bastards. The acclaimed director added, “So, to balance and create this feeling of darkness, the process of lighting was very difficult.” We now have a preview of how she pulled it off, as the first U.S. trailer has landed for the project.
Back at the film’s Cannes premiere, we applauded her “commanding grasp on composition and character, juxtaposing intense emotional scenes with shots whose visual character nearly broaches the area of abstraction.” This new trailer reveals this emotion and style, as subtitles and some new quotes are thrown following our French preview. Check it out below via Apple for the film also starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Michel Subor, Lola Créton and Grégoire Colin.
Acclaimed director Claire Denis’s jagged, daringly fragmented and darkest film is a genuinely contemporary film noir inspired by recent French sex ring scandals involving men of wealth and power. Vincent Lindon (Denis’s Friday Night) stars as Marco, a sea captain gone AWOL to avenge his brother-in-law’s suicide and to rescue his estranged sister and his teenaged niece (Lola Créton, Goodbye First Love); Chiara Mastroianni (A Christmas Tale) is Lindon’s married lover, who has sold her soul in exchange for the security of her young son; and the remarkable Michel Subor is her husband – a sleazy financier who is the very embodiment of an evil beyond comprehension. Denis takes the viewer into the very heart of darkness in her most unsettling film yet, an unforgettable and thrilling commentary on late capitalism.
Bastards hits theaters on October 23rd and arrives on VOD two days later.