I wish I’d gotten to this sooner to give moviegoers a little more notice but: My apologies and you only one more chance, tonight, to see Claire Denis’ “Bastards.”
The French-language film, a controversial one on the film festival circuit, is an unflinching look at the ways people who think they are being victimized are, in fact, culpable in their own victimization. “Bastards” has precisely one innocent character — a young woman whose naked vulnerability is visualized by having her walk through the movie literally naked — but everyone else (her mom, her uncle, an industrialist with a mysterious connection to her family, the industrialist’s wife) could accurately be referred to by the titular insult. The young woman has been injured and her father killed in an accident that the uncle is called in to investigate and, ultimately avenge (the story is, apparently, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s “The Bad Sleep Well,” which was, in turn, inspired by “Macbeth”). What he finds is not only truly disturbing but also a discomfiting demonstration that none of us is a reliable narrator of our own life.
Many thanks to Trylon Microcinema for giving the fascinating “Bastards” a local venue (here are deets of the screening: http://take-up.org/series/32/#843). And hurry!