The Great Acting Blog: “An Evocative Performance”

The Great Acting Blog: “An Evocative Performance”

Claire Denis’ Bastards is a fragmented, neo-noir about money, sex and revenge. At the heart of the film is Vincent Lindon, playing Marco, a seaman who is called to Paris because his sister is facing bankruptcy after her husband’s death. Lindon is drawn into a world of intrigue and corruption as he tries to unravel the mystery which lead to the death. The film itself is strikingly bleak and constructed brilliantly using flash-forwards and flash-backs, and shot using disconcerting close-ups.

Lindon’s performance is worthy of note though, because it’s reminiscent of the classical noir hero. His mostly inscrutable face gazes at the world with a certain fatigue, a certain lack of passion, as though ground down by witnessing too much evil in the world. This is interspersed however, with short bursts of ferocious intensity, which seem to erupt from nowhere, reminding me of Michel Piccoli at his most forceful.

It’s the kind of performance that we, lamentably, rarely see anymore. Lindon is restrained, there is no expository emoting, no pointless characterisation, and no fussy, distracting “naturalism”. Lindon possesses a certain distilled concentration, his work is more about bringing a screen presence, a screen persona to the film, than it is about serving up a character. In that sense, it alludes to the kind of acting we saw in the European arthouse of the mid-twentieth century, acting like that of a Monica Vitti or an Alain Delon.

On a technical level, it is difficult to really extrapolate any concrete, practical lessons, because it is not a hugely technical performance, Lindon seems to be simply allowing his natural persona to float through the film. It is said that, in it’s meditation on “individual indifference to social norms”, Bastards harks back to Chinatown. Vincent Lindon shows us that an actor’s performance too, can reference and so evoke an earlier cinema.

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