© 2019 by James Clark
Although this film, from 2018, proceeds with an English lexicon, it is most important to comprehend the French title. Une Vie en Hauteur, translates as, “a haughty, superior, arrogant approach toward others.” What sort of intransigence could be in play within our film today? There is, as we all know at some level, a distemper underway between amateurs of reality and those professionals regarding the former as having failed to digest the ultimacies already in full flower, namely, religion, humanitarianism and science. (All of which, seemingly, despite little tiffs, well embarking unconditionally all three of them at once.) With her film, High Life, filmmaker, Claire Denis, has squarely ventured into that latter buttress, science, whereby she stands (in many eyes) to be embarrassed by the “hauteur” of her betters. Moreover, let’s not kid ourselves that such “ladies” pastimes will be merely met with droll tolerance.
Our helmswoman here does have up her sleeve the resources of a guy who posthumously maintains a filmic action as far from “ladies concerns” as you can get, namely, Ingmar Bergman, an avatar of very high problematic. She has deployed for our considerations a film which, on the surface, has nothing to do with science, namely, The Seventh Seal (1957)—a biblical concomitant which leaves room for heresy during 12th century Sweden, bristling with witch-burning, flagellation and a far-reaching plague. A couple, Jof and Marie, itinerant circus entertainers, choose to be not fans of the regional leadership (just back from a crusade), who obsesses about living forever, by somewhat odd but actually usual means. The couple—but Jof definitely in the lead—see in their infant son a budding acrobatic genius and juggler the likes of which the world has never seen. Those latter gifts will reappear in our matter before us, in a scenario millennials’ into the future, whereby the march of (bored?) science has dreamed up travel far beyond the Solar System to transport death-row killers into the range of the nearest black hole, and others’ beyond, in hopes of some miracle. During this time-bending amazement, one protagonist, Monte, the highest flyer, another Jof, but very different, what with the bloody Jacobean melodrama blazing, encounters another such craft from that site of inspiration, but this time with a crew of dogs.
The first scenes appear to be far remote from a saga reeling from “hauteur,” let alone outer space. We begin with a lush and sunny vegetable garden sparked with reverberant musical undergrowth. Gentle mist brings about an ambience of decidedly earthy locale. Then a rather jarring note—a muddy pit and a ladder looking down. A baby cries, and we’re soon taken to an office where the child stands up in an improvised playpen, watching two screens featuring American Indians. The baby babbles happily, and, as if a cue, we cut to an astronaut, repairing something on the surface of the gray craft, while being connected by radio to the office. He smiles on hearing the happy child. “Da-da,” she calls. “Dada,” it is.
Then down to business. The show that day on the screens is short on baby talk. On the monitor at the left, there is, in silhouette, an aboriginal warrior on his horse (filmed in black and white). The peculiar headpiece resembles a bird of prey, or also a wolf’s head. (The world of wolves being germane in Bergman’s eyes, particularly in the film, Hour of the Wolf [1968].) On the monitor at right, we have a dying brave with, if not an atomic bomb, a lot of smoke pouring upward. The baby smiles. When the screen becomes a sunburst void, the young viewer begins to cry. The dad tries, “Shhh,” as a fix. She screams, and the enhanced communication factor causes a fright which results in the tool he was using to fly into the primal darkness. On his way in, we see a close-up of Monte’s mouth along with two cold spotlights in the surround. (Inherent cold?) Also, we see him wearing a set of underclothes which might have been used in the 12th century. Just before that entry, the repairman repairs to a reverie of circular stones and hardened mud in semi-darkness. Amidst that apparition was a small tooth-like, white object. Then the imagery attends to sharpened focus, and an arm with a bloody hand holding a bloody rock, which promptly relinquishes its burden into the void, to be followed by the arm lifting upward and quickly disappearing (perhaps elicited by the baby’s howl startling him to drop his wrench into infinity). Hour of the Wolf includes its protagonist fracturing the skull of a bothersome child by a similar action. And Monte, as later seen in flashback within that first flashback, had been on death row due to crushing the head of a young girl with the rock seen in that vision. Her annoyance to Monte involved noticing the mutilated and drowned dog of his he’d savaged, where we were able to see our-dad-of-the-hour displaying the full jacket from the avant-garde glimpse of sleeve.
When finally stifling for the time being that horror, the reformed travelling killer proves to be not so shabby a single parent. By way of the ladder, he accesses the garden, chooses a legume and promptly and gently provides a healthy pablum. After that, seated on the kitchen floor, he bathes the girl with skill, affection and patience. They play awhile with a red devil sort of doll. (Later, he withstands the girl’s loud and long crying jag.) But his loving solicitude does have a veer. With attention to emotive care, he delivers a sort of eccentric Ted Talk. “Don’t eat your own shit… Don’t drink your own piss… Don’t swallow horseshit… It’s called a taboo, tooo…booo… If my old man could see me now… Brake the laws of nature… You’ll pay for it, you son of a bitch!” After hours of deafening screaming, Monte complains to his only listener. “So many tears from such a tiny little body…Please, it’s gonna kill me…” It stops. The baby pulls at the skin on his arm. “Look at that,” he says. Monte sits by the bed, beholding a miracle. After she falls asleep, he says, “You don’t drown them like a dog… It’d be so easy… That’d be a first, and then me.” This sequence ends with him and her at the garden. She feeds him a strawberry, and he’s all smiles. At the ladder, he holds her and encourages her to climb up. “Up, up…”
“Don’t eat your own shit,” would be a strange but potent gambit as to disinterestedness. The avatars of advantage—and they number by the billions—can’t get enough of dubious golden oldies. Denis pivots at this point, whereby the action up till now constitutes the newest stage while flashback to the preboarding and then subsequent earlier vignettes march apace. Why? We need to see, by way of the history of this flight, how bad and how good things go under the aegis of a hard and dominant sell. Though the film finds Monte trying not to eat shit by challenging a lead pipe punk, namely, Boyse, for carving with a hard and sharp weapon a graffiti into a wall at the medical zone, we encounter her first a bit out of order (very appropriate for her) as an insert showing particulars before she’s arrested. Boyse, we’ll tell you now, is the baby’s mom, induced by the medic, Doctor Dibs, the Pedant of Pregnancy, who has recruited, all the guys but Monte, to a daily regime of masturbation for the sake of in vitro fertilization—the payoff being a mild drug. Her one and only success being with stand-off, Monte, as we’ll describe in the order of the flashback.
Whereas Boyse, as you’ll see, is almost totally feral and destructive during her stint in the sky, there is a brief but searing episode involving her on land, which leaves you enchanted. Like a great acrobat, she gracefully and powerfully uses the instances of the boxcar to reach the roof—in this rooftop position being kin to Monte. Moreover, the travellin’ kids resemble, somewhat, Jof and Marie, in their caravan. (A third rider, at another place on the train, puts up his middle finger and smiles in a rather shy manner to no one in particular; but to everyone in fact.) As night takes over, she leans back in a shallow container and relishes the currents from the plunge of the iron horse, and the darkness. She and her cohort sleep closely and on cardboard. Almost as gritty as old-time coal miners, it is the grottiness on their exposed calves that both repels and endears them to us. One more noteworthy, earlier moment on terra firma, consists of her stretching out here hand, to feel the ripple of prevailing wind as the train races on. In doing so, she’s surprisingly at work on her education, an education you won’t find in college because the jailers there have a very big gun (named, classical rational thought) trained on students and faculty alike. We saw that same laconic gesture with the protagonist of Denis,’ White Material (2009), wherein she was having too much adventurous—actually, suicidal—fun to heed the classical rational chopper screaming at her to get the hell up and out of a nasty civil war.
Back to the dust-up at the hospital/ lab, Boyse rips a long wound along Monte’s arm, for his interfering in her showing how little she respects the doctor. (Bergman had a long history of portraying medics as not up to the intimacies of sensibility.) While being patched up by Dr. Dibs (that term denoting Straight A’s as far as it goes), the patient, rather surprisingly, sees fit to explicitly mention that he sees value in her range of interests. (Though he comes across as an inflected born-again Aquarian, he does have a whack of pedantry. Will it cripple, over [bloated] time here, his scatological commitment to disinterestedness? [Back to the time of the baby, we see him earnestly posting reports—for instance, how he removed and replaced the defective piece of surface—while such messaging had been defeated by the light-years’ gap. On the other hand, he brags, “I never caved in” [to the sleep-killing noise]. And then the baby’s strawberry gift to Monte; and Boyce’s strawberry hair and complexion, once scrubbed up. Bergman’s, Wild Strawberries [1957] being a parable of pristine recovery. The numeral “7,” placed on the craft and on all the uniforms, perhaps refers to the release date, 1957, of both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. The signage, “9,” on the dog craft, might refer to Bergman’s, The Passion of Anna, 1959, where the protagonist is a killer of farm animals. Denis often joins Jim Jarmusch’s umbrage [not to mention’s that of Kelly Reichardt] toward those abusing entities far more consistently and effectively balanced than humans. Monte’s history of killing his dog, not to mention killing his neighbor, would be perhaps a factor not completely resolved.)
We already have a lot of cards on the table, here; but a direction to thrill us is nowhere to be seen. Or, rather, I’ve found it advisable until now, that the soundtrack and playlist be stilled, the better to orient the viscosity and traction struggling to make headway. Denis’ musical force, “Tindersticks” (having already almost stolen the show in her film, 35 Shots of Rum [2009]), endeavor, by reverberant and seductive aural thrust, to further illuminate the mastery of eschewing one’s own shit. Much startling pain and confusion are right around the corner. But it is the measure of thrust (acrobatics) we must especially ponder.
We could describe the crisis woven for us to be the limits of control. As it happens, Jim Jarmusch put out, in 2009, a film, called, The Limits of Control, including actress, Tilda Swinton, tall, thin and blonde, who comes to an unpleasant end. Another of the killers onboard here, rather alike Tilda (but with a prominent scar the length of her right cheek), confronts Dibs, “Why do you keep taking this sperm?” Her stressed response is, “The odds are not in our favor. But when my work of perfection is achieved…” That unwelcome question drives the perfectionist to another dimension of bounty, situated by the stairs close to the earthy garden, namely, that presiding lunge of emotive delight, known as the fuckbox, a small but powerful rollercoaster to help survive the stupid fuckers who stuck them there. Joining Dibs nearer to what really matters to her, when freed of taboos, and with the band of the day attending to reverb and real invention, she, along with means of intervention, joins those dance rebels (writhing acrobats) like Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker and Martha Graham. (The Bergman film—and right here I’d like to declare how many viewers were wrong about it being a flop, namely, The Serpent’s Egg [1977], features such a dance innovation.) On ending her gig, she immediately bumps into Monte headed to the garden. “I know I look like a witch,” she says. Her handsome outreach (juggling) is met by Monte’s pedantry, “That doesn’t seem to do you much good.” Her retort, “Better than you think,” does, at least leave room for imperfection. Monte, overly proud to tell himself and her, “I kept my fluids to myself,” continues, “So humiliating… You need to wipe your nose.” He rubs her upper lip. An odd register between a boss and an underling, however the miasma may run. But not an odd register between spouses. (Boyse will, later on, have the nerve to pull from her that Dibs had wiped out her whole family. But her credentials gave her a measure of gravitas.) The one sworn to saves lives argues, “You all come to look at me at night.” He counters, “You’re foxy and you know it. I just can’t understand your mission… I still believe in the mission. However, he can conclude, “It’s just a new religion for you.” And she can swing back to, “Because I’m totally devoted to reproduction.” She leaves him with, “Happy Monk, going to sew your fields.”
The slipping and sliding of that twosome on the go, close to the speed of sound, have, going forward, neither the luxury nor the talent to polish their genius. On their voyage to short love and long death, they become immersed with disease and murderous hate. But their far from insignificant efforts lift this crash to something sublime. Boyce, swamped by her refusal to recognize limits of control involving a paradoxical agency, peels away from the center of the action, to be briefly superseded by the leukemia of a man beset by the lurking of radiation. Having a glimpse of her at her level best, we’re not astonished that Dibs has a heart. Her empathy strikingly conveys cinematically by the superimposing over her face of the cancer cells from a scan. So engaged is she by soothing the pain in gently touching him, the dying man kisses Dibs and she responds in kind. In contrast, there is Monte, with light years away from wisdom, crudely insisting, “I have good genes.” He adds, “Stink, the usual stench. It gets me hard…” Dismissing such trash, she assures the victim she’ll dull his pain. “There is nothing to fear, I promise…” He responds, “Everything’s gonna’ be fine…” On the heels of that real confluence, she unfortunately declares, “No one to help me, as I’m helping you… No one to put me out of my misery… I’m alone with my guilt…” The man closest to death tries to say something. She puts her ear to his mouth. She inserts the poison, and she mourns the disappearance, more profound than a black hole.
Also getting him hard in this moment is a frail young Brit with a triangular tattoo on his neck and another one on his arm. He’s no Stephen Hawking (that celebrated black-hole-mathematically-sharp-gazer); but there is something about his irreverence and appetite for the flashy—following up Dibs at the earthquake room, and addressing her as, “Fucking cock block” –which is bound to be spectacular, if not tremendously substantive. In the wake of the long death throes, he wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers that he craves more dark stories. He comes to a three-woman bedroom and decides to rape Boyse. The ensuant disarray involves the tall skeptic wedded to the limits of control trying to help a figure who knows another field of dynamics. The former gets dragged out to the corridor and beaten senseless. Monte arrives and subdues the rapist; and while his attention is elsewhere in the chaos another woman with a knife stabs the troublemaker many fatal times, including ripping out his eyes.
Earlier on, there is a dip to our planet where a celebrity pundit conducts an interview with a Millennial journalist, around Boyse’s age. They’re sitting in First Class, and the subject is the flight and what a shame the physicists are on the wrong track to rehabilitate criminals. He’s particularly miffed that the space riders on the rapid move, with a vehicle resembling a ghetto Walmart, will never return to Earth. Dibs, though sleeping through the little war, is on the hook to elevate the tone she actually knows quite a bit about. (If she felt like it, she’d have pondered the syntheses flashing on the two triangular tattoos, and the triad of lights at the craft’s rear end.) Beyond lockdowns she knows she needs some magic, being a witch, a bit more stable than the witch in The Seventh Seal, who, nevertheless, does better than the pundit. Sometime, perhaps prodigious speed-of-light later, she tip-toes to Monte’s bed and sort of rapes him. While he sleeps through the invasion, she pledges her love to him. She kisses his hand; she sucks his finger; she opens her blouse. “Will you hold me?” she whispers. “Why don’t you take me in your arms? I close my eyes. I hold you… Hold me…” She mounts him. “Feel me, Monte.” Astride, and a moment of far-sighted love, she kisses him. “Monte, thank you!” She carries the semen to the lab, places it in a vial, comes to Boyse’s bed, kisses her belly and introduces the semen. This singularity elicits a blaze of a galaxy tinted with pink hues.
Soon after the violent targeting of Boyse, and quite a while before she’s pregnant, she’s with Dibs at the clinic. The witch remarks, “Not so easy to get inside you as you think…” Boyse, rather surprisingly, laments, “I’ll never have kids. I’m sure of it.” (That happens to be the same remark by Eve, a flakey and promiscuous wife, in Bergman’s film, Shame [1968].) The hardened cynic asks for confirmation that the controller killed her youngster. “With a knife!” is the answer. Countering her dismay, she moisturizes her hands and braids her remarkably long hair. Soon after Boyse, with a baby in an incubator and pouring out milk, there comes to her a storm of resentment concerning a looming loss of wildness. (Not so easy to get inside the you.) Dibs’ delight in this coup (Monte not yet up to speed) coincides with a close encounter of the first of many planned and completely daft “experiments” –perhaps a Trump-like administration in play—with a neighborhood of comic-based thrills. The skeptical blonde had been tagged to take one for the team, but Boyse, thinking that her best move would be a comic book finale, kills the intended and goes on to kill herself with a black entity demanding grown-up reflection.
There is a cordial black (perhaps a one-time traitor of “intelligence”) who shares the work of gardening, and who misses his gospel-based wife. His quirky will to die coincides with the outset of Monte’s tenure of parenting. Dibs, our protagonist’s not-quite-to-roll-on as a Marie to Monte’s Jof, due to her being assassinated by one of her many enemies, and according by him a dignified funeral in slow-motion upon the heavens, may have lost a new outlook on life. But Monte, that lucky stiff, shows us a possibility and a failed possibility of some measure. (As seen before the long, long flashback, there was now visibility about his visit to the multiplex’s morgue [with a complement awaiting a miracle], suiting them out and flushing them out to graces of dynamics they hardly knew. One other thing, he descends to a tantrum concerning the phenomenon of death there. Looks like overcoming eating your own shit is still a work in progress.)
As we begin to put an end to that early odd story, the witch’s singularity has overshot that noisy baby girl. (One moment back there, shows Monte opening the incubator door. He holds the baby and he smiles.) She’s an adolescent now, and the delight with the baby has been overrun by bothersome questions—a bothersome girl about that age having once been murdered by him. Monte’s first annoyance onscreen is that she insists upon sleeping with him. “Get outta here…Too heavy now…Go back to your own bunk… Crazy girl!” In her bunk she calls out, “Too far…”
Facing the day, we are struck by the shabbiness of their clothes and the craft’s interior. Will to live is on the line. The baby’s name is Willow. Their dilemma is extraordinary, but not unprecedented. How to go forward in what certainly appears to be a dead-end. (Boyse and her friends on the freight were about that.) Monte has become subdued; but he does now instinctively describe an acrobatic move with his hands. The ship is an eyesore, but in addition to its long history of essential emptiness, it continues to maintain three lights in triangular form. The Hawking departure went nowhere. But the magic of true dialectic was there for the asking. Willow is of a mind to say, “Looks like out.” The visit from “9” (perhaps, as mentioned, regarding Bergman’s film, The Passion of Anna [1969], where the title figure comes to light as a maniacal killer of farm animals) is probably unhelpful regarding their being between a rock and a hard place. (Moreover, there is the virtual date of 1959 for the Bergman film, The Magician, where a wizard is not.) But, then, beasts are not to be overlooked. Then there is the notice, on a dysfunctional apparatus, announcing, “Communication Error.” This barrier somehow drives Willow to realize, “We don’t need help.”
In the brush with the dogs, Monte covers her eyes, guessing more slaughter to come. Its turning out to be merely sad sends her reverting to childishness. “I want a dog so bad!” She calls him cruel for worrying about an epidemic, a plague. “What do you know about cruelty?” he snaps. (The plague being probably everywhere.) He retreats to the garden and washes up. She tells him, “You’re right, dad. I’m sorry. I have everything I need here…” (That couldn’t be right, could it?) The soundtrack rings out a far-reaching possibility. The undirected screen comes back to life, and delivers a Half-Time American Football marching band (perhaps not so far-reaching). He notices her in the disposition of praying. “What God are you praying to?” She explains, “I saw them on the random images from Earth. I just wanted to know how it feels. An event onscreen shoes the ancient blue and white Swedish flag, from the era of Jof and Marie. They have a view of another black hole.” “It’s like a mouth that just swallows up,” he says. “Too big.” she agrees. But she comes back with, “We should try it. To feel it” [Boyse felt it]. Monte’s hair is now pepper and salt. He quietly chides, “Thought we were supposed to be drifters.” (That couldn’t be right, could it?) She persists, “But it’s so big… I think the density is very low.” He shakes his head. “I believe it,” she concludes. Now they’re at the entry zone, setting up a two-seater, like the one Boyse commandeered. Something possesses her to add, “I’m sad you’d leave your data, even your prisoner list” [pedantry being a hard disease to beat]. In quite a mood swing, resembling her mother, she declares, “I’ll be destroyed by the fire wall of the black hole, anyway!” Now en route, she over activating the ways of acrobatics, she reports, “Here’s the fire wall. I know it. We’ll make it through.” From here to there, she turns to the super-quixotic: “Do I look like my mother?” [quite a question]. Since she clearly looks more like Monte [or Dibs] than Boyse, his answers, as to her mother’s features, are all no’s. He tells her she has rodent teeth… a little rat… But he grants her, “You’re special. You’re like no one else. I love that.” Their little ship has only two lights. The magic did not prevail. But there was some golden to love.
We then see a rapid re-spooling of scenes of defeat: the aboriginals; the garden; #7… With an oxygen level of appalment, the drama takes over, asking why did they shut down? True, there were mountains (as per Monte) to manage. But the second necessity, juggling, was hardly considered in this rocketing blaze of being a soloist, first and foremost.
This film’s underwhelming optics plays into that aberration. But its aural life brims with reverberance, a ripple of energy, wherein juggling comes to life, and that careless term, “the heavens,” comes onboard. Denis’ association with the British band, Tindersticks, has carried us to new frontiers of mood; and mood, whether acknowledged or not is pretty much everything. Sonic acrobatic initiatives and their juggling responsiveness-in-appreciation installs a work and play space to challenge the suicidal outcome in High Life. Were the last two standing fully aware of that dance of life, the radical confinement could have sustained duets and solos-not-so-definitively-solo.
Willow
Willow, where are you hiding now?
Willow, where are you hiding now?
In the dappled light, deep in the trees
The spiders and the centipedes
Crawl across your hands, across your knees.
Willow, do you walk across the sand?
Willow, do the waves crash and fall?
And their fingers tickle at your feet
And pull a little as they retreat.
Do you feel the rushing forward?
Though you’re standing still?
Willow, are we rushing forward, are we standing still?
Willow, are we rushing forward, are we standing still?
Willow, do you crouch among the rooftops?
Willow, do you listen to the city wheezing?
And your dreams, they stretch beyond the clouds
And past…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOHFktF5E1o