The first English-language film by Claire Denis is a beguiling, audacious journey into space, with Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche along for the rideSee our unfolding list of the year’s 50 best filmsMore on the best culture of 2019‘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).