Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Something special happens when an auteur goes to space.
They push their stylistic and thematic limits.
you could see it inFirst Man, which might be Chazelles most emotionally reflective work yet.
Claire Denis, on the other hand, is working with pure speculation and metaphor inHigh Life.
Shes not even interested in getting the zero-G stuff right.
(Neil deGrasse Tyson will have a conniption fit if he sees this movie.
High Lifeis enigmatic even by Claire Denis standards.
Looking for intimate, seemingly offhand moments, shes interested in texture over narrative, behavior over character.
The story takes place over years, even decades.
The result is a weird hybrid: a narrative that moves, but also confounds.
It offers little character development or resolution, but plenty of incident.
Its not hard to see why such films are getting made these days.
(First Manis presumably hoping to benefit from this trend as well.)
And in almost each of these cases, the director emerges from the experience somewhat changed.
(DecembersRomawill be his first release since.)
Of course, the granddaddy of auteur space movies is Stanley Kubricks2001: A Space Odyssey.
Before2001, he had been a confident, careful storyteller in the classical mold.
Kubrick chanced upon the comic insanity of the movie by mostly playing the story straight.)
After that, nothing he made would be accepted as merely a movie.
(Of course, it flopped.)
The desire to stretch the limits of form can affect even those space movies that dont quite warrant it.
And things get progressively more aestheticized as the ship approaches the sun.
Which is perhaps understandable, save for one problem: The narrative itself actually becomesmoreconventional as the film proceeds.
A little past the halfway mark,Sunshinebasically turns into a slasher movie in space.
The result is a fascinating, troubled, occasionally beautiful work at war with itself.
Full disclosure: IloveDanny Boyle.
I think hes probably made more masterpieces than most filmmakers working today.
Even so, its hard not to feel like he left something behind withSunshine.
Hes never attempted anything that stylistically daring since.
Of course, there are plenty of space movies where the filmmakers didnt attempt to rock the boat.
But there, too, the directors restraint feels almost counterintuitive and pays creative dividends as a result.
Perhaps similarly, filmmakers are liberated by the genre, and the setting.
The unfussy storytellers hunker down, the philosophers become more philosophical, and the stylists go full-on bonkers.
