Robert Pattinson spoke at The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Free Talk for High Life at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center yesterday (April 04, 2019) in New York City. The film is directed by the acclaimed modern French cinema director Claire Denis. Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images Here is the film’s synopsis: Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to the outer reaches of the solar system. The crew death-row inmates led by a doctor (Juliette Binoche) with sinister motives has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole. A staggering and primal film about love and intimacy, suffused with anguished memories of a lost Earth, High Life is a haunting, thrilling achievement from visionary director Claire Denis Pattinson has stated previously on how making this movie was a long journey. [irp posts=952] Praising her for risk-taking as well as her humor—the movie drew gasps for its explicit nude scenes—Pattinson said the shoot was “like going to another country.” Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images The collaboration came partly at the actor’s own instigation, he said. “I’d been pursuing Claire for ages,” Pattinson recalled. “We met in LA, and I just really liked her in the meeting. [But] it was just one of those really long processes—I think it was four years later or something when we did the movie, and it’s probably been an eight-year process [in all].” Watch the trailer below: Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images<doc-sep>Metacritic score: 76 High Life is a wild, visionary film from director Claire Denis about a group of convicts on death row who are sent into deep space for the sake of science. It’s not for the faint of heart — it’s about sex and reproduction and death and life — and it’s anything but sterile. In this case, sci-fi’s enduring quest to probe what it means to be human means that bodily fluids, violence, and deep loneliness all make their appearances. Robert Pattinson leads a cast that also features Mia Goth and Juliette Binoche, and gives a performance that’s equal parts unexpected and tender, as a father on board the ship caring for his young daughter in what is essentially a life lived as a death sentence. All told, the film is a confounding meditation on what it means to truly exist — and it’s wholly original.<doc-sep>In 2001, the French film-maker Claire Denis performed a full vivisection of the vampire film with Trouble Every Day, a philosophical, ambiguous take on the usual tropes of horror. She rendered the building blocks of an often schematic genre frightening and alien through novel formal techniques. Instead of lurking monsters jumping out to spook the audience, the camera often sneaked up on its subjects, while her narrative resisted convention at every turn in pursuit of loftier ideas about existence and transformation. The average Dracula fan might have thought they had wandered into a parallel dimension. Seventeen years and six features later, and everything old is new again. Denis has turned her sights on sci-fi, reconfiguring its familiar components to create a startlingly fresh engagement with the question of what it means to be human. It’s the genre’s most done-to-death topic, yet she brings something truly original to the conversation. Her answer, as the spectacular High Life tells it, has a lot to do with achieving orgasm. Bodily functions abound in this captivating journey through the void of space. Lactation, ejaculation and gestation clue the viewer in on what Denis might be getting at through an elliptical story, in which an eclectic cast play a collection of death-row inmates forced to cohabitate on a self-sustaining station in orbit. Their assignment – to explore black holes in the hopes of harvesting their rotational energy for the citizens of Earth – is sold to them as an opportunity for heroism. However, it’s not long before they realise that they’re all but guaranteed to perish in the process. Mission drift sets in, and the on-board doctor, Dibs (Juliette Binoche in a French braid of Rapunzelian proportions), starts conducting experiments of her own with captives Monte (Robert Pattinson) and Boyse (Mia Goth). This film’s fleet 110 minutes contain too many shocks and amazements to be spelled out here. Suffice it to say that Denis proposes the erotic drive as the fuel to use when there’s nothing left to live for. In the negative zone beyond the stratosphere, depicted as a physical glitch humankind was never meant to explore, severe isolation returns the brain to its basest biological capacity. Every day is a battle to stay sane (less apparent among Denis’ feats here is that she has casually constructed a remorselessly honest look into the psychological ramifications of incarceration), so extreme, bizarre measures must sometimes be called on. With an achievement of this calibre it’s hard to resist hyperbole: High Life contains the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema. Dormant desire … Robert Pattinson in High Life. The brilliance of Denis’ films, with their arresting imagery, tends to creep up on viewers hours or even days later – the film critic Manny Farber dubbed this class of work “termite art”. But her astral epic also offers a more immediate appeal – situated, as it is, in the iconic corridors of Alien and the like. Using faintly retro technological interfaces and sleek production design she smuggles in her musings on memory and being. If Tarkovsky got away with it in Stalker, then why not her? She courts the comparison early on, reproducing a noted shot of a dog in a river, and then amply earns it by establishing a fluid slipstream between Monte’s past, present, and future. Where does Denis get off, making a film so densely theoretical and superficially satisfying? Though, on second thought, High Life is a thesis on exactly where (and how) Denis gets off. It’s always risky when an overseas master tries their hand in English language with Hollywood actors. Denis surmounts the challenge with exemplary finesse, holding on to her intelligence and the skill with which she executes it, while playing to the flashier pleasures of big-budget American product. No matter where she goes – to the furthest reaches of the known universe, or the fringe boundaries of semi-reputable genres – a Claire Denis film is a Claire Denis film. Accept no substitutes.<doc-sep>
Robert Pattinson may be best known globally for his performance in Twilight as a forever teen, but the content of his latest lineup of prestige films—from the last year’s drug-fueled sleeper hit Good Time to the upcoming High Life—is certainly not for children. In High Life, Pattinson will play an imprisoned astronaut on a space journey alongside Juliette Binoche, André 3000, and Mia Goth for director Claire Denis’s first English-language film. Early reviews are generating enough buzz about the film to color Pattinson’s die-hard fans intrigued (and according to Deadline, it was just picked up for distribution by A24 after its Toronto International Film Festival debut), but it turns out that the film may be less about space travel and the vast nature of the universe (or multiverse) and more about…intergalactic sex acts? What may actually be the most bonkers element of this movie is that a significant portion of the plot development occurs in what is called a “f–kbox,” according to a Vulture interview with the film’s director, Claire Denis. The original script, which referred to the so-called “f–kbox” as a “love machine,” was reworded thanks to the audience’s initial responses to the film (apparently, referring to the area as a “love machine” was too French). “There are two scenes that are most important for the audience. There’s the garden, which is the only place for them to remember life on Earth. The other is the f–kbox, a terrible place to be alone, not like masturbating in a bed,” Denis explained. “The privacy in the f–kbox is horrible, and to try to come is impossible,” she went on. The French director also commented on the phallic nature of the set design, which reportedly has more in common with the Nostromo from Alien than the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. “It looks like a sword! If they fixate on that, then they are getting the bigger picture,” Denis told Vulture. Pattinson recently joked that he was “ready to play 17 at a moment’s notice” when asked about a possible Twilight reunion (and Claire Denis claimed in her Vulture interview that he does have a “naked youth in him”), but if the actor’s association with Denis’s sci-fi space sex drama is any indication of how hard he is willing to work to distance himself from any sort of archetype, no one will be thinking of him as a teen for much longer. Related: Robert Pattinson Considers Himself a Sex Professional, Sort Of