‘High Life’ is really boring … until it isn’t
High Life Rated: R (for disturbing sexual and violent content including sexual assault, graphic nudity and for language. Running time: 110 minutes. 66 1⁄2 out of 4
Five minutes into “High Life,” the thought crosses the mind. Maybe Claire Denis is trying to kill the audience. Maybe she wants to bore everyone to death — you know, just for fun.
Denis is a major director with a fierce independent streak. She pursues her own vision, and sometimes the results are sublime (“Let the Sunshine In”) and sometimes awful (“Trouble Every Day”), but always without compromise. Anyway, for about 10 minutes, “High Life” seems like it’s going to be one of those Denis films, with a story consisting of nothing but a man (Robert Pattinson) on a spaceship talking to his baby daughter.
Then something interesting happens. The spaceman walks into a room, and we see that there are five other space people, men and women, dead on the floor. He opens a door that leads to the black nothingness outside and, one by one, he drags colleagues over and drops them into the abyss. And each time he does, we tense up, because we think he just might lose his balance and fall into nothingness himself.
Much of “High Life” takes place in flashback, at the point when everyone on the ship was still alive. There are six passengers in total, all under the supervision of a Dr. Dibs, played by Juliette Binoche. Dr. Dibs hands out drugs and controls the amount of sedative that goes into the drinking water. It’s a fun role for Binoche, in that she gets to play her normal screen self — composed, but with a reckless streak — but with a certain new inflection. Instead of reckless, she might actually be crazy.
Denis takes her time. While she’s at it, she takes our time. “High Life” is slow, not by accident and not really by miscalculation, but because it probably had to be. The movie depicts a journey that doesn’t seem to have an endpoint, so time stretches out, and there’s no reason for anyone to rush. Still, as you can imagine, such a situation hardly makes for gripping drama.
What we get, instead, is a movie that is always vaguely interesting but that, here and there, finds ways to be brilliant in a wonderfully twisted way: Binoche goes into a rectangular box and closes a door, and next thing you know she seems to be riding what looks like a metal horn. She’s covered in sweat, and moaning in ecstasy, and she walks out looking drained, but satisfied.
Apparently, this device is something like the “orgasmatron” in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy, “Sleeper.” The difference is that this machine — nicknamed the F-box (or something a little more explicit) on the ship — is no sight gag. Denis is not trying to make the audience laugh. If anything, she’s trying to make audiences jealous. That scene with Binoche is the best commercial for a nonexistent product that the world has ever seen.
Incidentally, the look of the spaceship is worth noting. You know how spaceship interiors in movies are always perfectly clean? They’re not in “High Life,” because why would they be? Who’s doing the cleaning? Nobody. And you know how the interior design on these ships is always smooth and pristine, like a new iPhone? Well, in “High Life,” many of the interiors here look like the inside of a truck, because Denis knows: Romance is something as perceived from a distance. Close-up, everything human is workaday, whether it’s Versailles or the White House or a spaceship on the other side of the galaxy.
So should you see “High Life”? Put it this way: It’s admirable, but it has long stretches of dull, and the tickets aren’t free. Still, if the above description sounds of interest, then by all means have a few cups of coffee and give it a chance.