A voyage across continents and time and space happens The body takes, the body transfigures itself, the body rejects Two sides of a new heart struggle to beat as one in an old man who owes many debts, while two hemispheres continually peopled with billions of inhabitants struggle to beat as one after billions of years of continental break-ups and ice ages and mass extinctions and mass migrations and devastating wars and the rise and fall of sweeping civilizations, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of unpaid debts that will one day be wiped out in one single blow if the core of the the son, I mean sun, burn out.
An infant smiles at his father, a father searches for an abandoned son, a son has his heart torn out.
Trebor troubadours cross countries and oceans, from the Alps of Switzerland to the Polynesian paradise of Tahiti, in the hope of obtaining a new heart and finding his abandoned son and escaping his conscious.
He swims and cycles and walks and sails and flies, in hot pursuit of a heart, in hot pursuit of a son who may or may not exist, in hot flight from past guilt, in hot tangles of dreams that may or may not be figments of his overheated brain.
His internal experience of his failing heart and new heart and guilty conscience and colonized environment transforms his familiar world into the unfamiliar, and psychological vertigo rises up and chases him into the shifting quicksands of his mind; what he remembers is real, what he remembers is not real; still chained to the Alps, he tumbles through limitless space, and the spatial disorientation is transformed by Denis into an exhilarating, whirling, fluid, cinematographic extravaganza of sensorial movement, with Trebor's potential for balance and self-reconciliation unattainable as the ghosts of his conscience peck away at his heart.
He's a stranger in strange land with a stranger living within him and a stranger shadowing him in the daytime and a stranger shadowing him in the evening, wild dogs in front of him and wild dogs behind him, a cross to the left and an empty grave to the right and a coffin in the middle, his soul yearning for a rejuvenation and a resurrection and ascension that are elusive mirages glimpsed in his dreams that burn out his heart.
He is unhomed but not homeless, his shadowed past eclipses him and he's forced to take measure of his own dwelling within a mental/psychological state of statelessness, alienation, disorientation, unhomedness, existential terror, etc.
He is not only suffering from a deathly paralysis of the heart, he's suffering from a cultural and psychological paralysis, which drives him to restructure his life around a formal structure he once abandoned, drives him to achieve a balance of space and place and culture and memory, but his overabundance of cultural memory and guilt and hallucination creates emotional vertigo, derailing him every step of the way.
His existence is rooted in a beloved son he has 100% faith in yet never met, an abandoned son he thinks is perfect and seeks to unite with in order to cleanse his soul, an idolized, cryptic, insubstantial son represented by a false son who fails to fill the void.
A Dionysian crown and an alpha and an omega and another son crucified and a demon scratching from beneath the clouded ice trickle-trope his journey and wrack his heart.
Trebor is an old man with a besieged body and a besieged conscience and besieged dreams, there are besieged borders (Russian crossed into the Alps with legal documentation) and besieged cultures (Franco-Swiss, Tahiti-French/Polynesia, France-South Korea) and a besieged Christ (won't explain that in this message, but the traditional symbols are in the film from beginning to end).
A heart is implanted but the guilt is unleashed, the mythical son is not found and the son real son is sacrificed.
L'Intrus is a spectacular, sensorial, kinesthetic experience, non-linear motion and reflux, transalpining and transmarining, transplanting and transplaning, transmigrating and transubstantiating, just wow, I've watched this three times and each time I was left breathless by just the vertiginous sensorial experience.
An infant smiles at his father, a father searches for an abandoned son, a son has his heart torn out.
Trebor troubadours cross countries and oceans, from the Alps of Switzerland to the Polynesian paradise of Tahiti, in the hope of obtaining a new heart and finding his abandoned son and escaping his conscious.
He swims and cycles and walks and sails and flies, in hot pursuit of a heart, in hot pursuit of a son who may or may not exist, in hot flight from past guilt, in hot tangles of dreams that may or may not be figments of his overheated brain.
His internal experience of his failing heart and new heart and guilty conscience and colonized environment transforms his familiar world into the unfamiliar, and psychological vertigo rises up and chases him into the shifting quicksands of his mind; what he remembers is real, what he remembers is not real; still chained to the Alps, he tumbles through limitless space, and the spatial disorientation is transformed by Denis into an exhilarating, whirling, fluid, cinematographic extravaganza of sensorial movement, with Trebor's potential for balance and self-reconciliation unattainable as the ghosts of his conscience peck away at his heart.
He's a stranger in strange land with a stranger living within him and a stranger shadowing him in the daytime and a stranger shadowing him in the evening, wild dogs in front of him and wild dogs behind him, a cross to the left and an empty grave to the right and a coffin in the middle, his soul yearning for a rejuvenation and a resurrection and ascension that are elusive mirages glimpsed in his dreams that burn out his heart.
He is unhomed but not homeless, his shadowed past eclipses him and he's forced to take measure of his own dwelling within a mental/psychological state of statelessness, alienation, disorientation, unhomedness, existential terror, etc.
He is not only suffering from a deathly paralysis of the heart, he's suffering from a cultural and psychological paralysis, which drives him to restructure his life around a formal structure he once abandoned, drives him to achieve a balance of space and place and culture and memory, but his overabundance of cultural memory and guilt and hallucination creates emotional vertigo, derailing him every step of the way.
His existence is rooted in a beloved son he has 100% faith in yet never met, an abandoned son he thinks is perfect and seeks to unite with in order to cleanse his soul, an idolized, cryptic, insubstantial son represented by a false son who fails to fill the void.
A Dionysian crown and an alpha and an omega and another son crucified and a demon scratching from beneath the clouded ice trickle-trope his journey and wrack his heart.
Trebor is an old man with a besieged body and a besieged conscience and besieged dreams, there are besieged borders (Russian crossed into the Alps with legal documentation) and besieged cultures (Franco-Swiss, Tahiti-French/Polynesia, France-South Korea) and a besieged Christ (won't explain that in this message, but the traditional symbols are in the film from beginning to end).
A heart is implanted but the guilt is unleashed, the mythical son is not found and the son real son is sacrificed.
L'Intrus is a spectacular, sensorial, kinesthetic experience, non-linear motion and reflux, transalpining and transmarining, transplanting and transplaning, transmigrating and transubstantiating, just wow, I've watched this three times and each time I was left breathless by just the vertiginous sensorial experience.