The Intruder (15)

The film certainly takes its time letting you know what it's about. You feel lost right from the start, as images pass by in quick succession: a van is inspected for drugs on the Franco-Swiss border; a French customs officer goes home to be felt up by her husband; an elderly man sunbathes in the mountains with his two dogs; two mysterious young women separately lurk with intent in the woods. Things get stranger, and more violent: someone gets their throat cut, so quickly and in such darkness that you can't make out who; a body is found frozen under ice; a character is dragged across the snow by horses, whether in reality or dream, or just hypothetically, it's hard to tell. To cap it all, Béatrice Dalle, swathed in fur, her gapped teeth gleaming more ferally than ever, presides over a pack of huskies. That's even before the action has moved to Korea.

The film does have a narrative, however although I offer you the following less as an explanation, more as a guiding thread. Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), an elderly man with an unspecified, presumably shady past, lives alone with his dogs in the mountainous Jura region of France. He has an adult son (Grégoire Colin), whom he hardly sees, and another that he's never met, somewhere in Polynesia. Trebor also has a bad heart and enough money to procure a new one, through questionable channels: the deal is brokered by a Russian woman (Katia Golubeva), who turns up wherever Trebor goes, shadowing him like his own imminent death. After his transplant - we never see the operation, only the scar - Trebor travels to South Korea to buy a boat, then to Polynesia in search of his elusive southern son.

Not that you need to know this - I'm not sure it even helps - but Denis's film is inspired by a short book in which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on his own heart transplant. Another inspiration was The Ebb-Tide, one of Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas stories: her hero's name, as well as echoing Subor's, is Robert backwards (and positively nothing to do with mints). By a bizarre coincidence, unknown to Denis when she embarked on the project, Michel Subor shot a film in Polynesia in 1961, based on The Ebb-Tide and never completed.

Excerpts from that film appear - unannounced, like hallucinatory flashes - in The Intruder, and one of the film's wonders is the contrast between Subor's wolfish young looks in the clips and his bulky, lizard-like grandeur today. Subor, the lead in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat in 1961, had drifted into semi-obscurity when Denis cast him in her 1999 film Beau Travail, and it is one of the marvels of The Intruder to see a genuine icon of the early Nouvelle Vague still cut an imposing figure today. The Intruder is partly a contemplation of the aging process, and the way we resist it. At 70, Subor seems to be resisting it better than most: seen naked in some scenes, mountain biking in others, he's alarmingly fit, in both senses, and if ever a film by a woman director displayed an amorous regard for its male star, it's this one.

Among other things, The Intruder is a magnificent landscape film: Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard create breathtakingly stark Cinemascope vistas of the Jura in different seasons. It's also an extraordinary travelogue, its seascapes filling the screen with great sheets of blue and purple. And it's one of those rare films in which a film-maker has the freedom, and the desire, simply to record whatever drifts into her field of vision. A huge red paper globe disgorging streamers on a Korean quayside is relevant to the overall theme insofar as it vaguely resembles a heart: but more to the point, Denis saw it, marvelled at it, and shares it with us. And Trebor has a jolly, boozy evening with a Korean sailor, who, for all we know, happened to wander onto the shoot.

The film's final third is less teasingly cryptic than the rest and settles into a kind of quasi-ethnographic mundanity: it's typical of Denis's perversity, however, that she should make Polynesia look workaday, and turn rural France into a dreamscape. The denouement is entirely inexplicable, although that should worry you only if you're totally determined that the film should make sense in strictly narrative terms. I've watched The Intruder three times now, and I can't imagine tiring of it, or getting to the bottom of it, in a hurry. It may send you up the wall or into raptures, but this flamboyantly cosmopolitan film imparts more of a sense of discovery, of voyaging without a map, than just about anything I've seen in quite a while.

j.romney@independent.co.uk