The query Pauline Kael once put to Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, i.e. “the Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party” films of the 60s, is fitting for Alice Winocour’s Disorder: “[These films] are so introverted, so interior that I think the question must be asked, is there something so new and deep in them, or are they simply empty?” Out of those three, Disorder plays most like Antonioni’s. Though, I don’t share Kael’s sentiment; I love La Notte. It has the best use of rain in any film, is one of the best edited pieces of cinema I’ve seen, and has Monica Vitti caught in a relational sparring match between Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Winocour’s newest is evocative of the Italian classic. But it stops there. There’s great flourish, style, prowess, yet I left with Kael’s same notion – emptiness.
Vincent – played with great conviction by Matthias Schoenaerts – has returned home to France from a tour in Afghanistan. He suffers from PTSD and is told that he might not be able to return to the war. Winocour sets his psychological state up with quick, muscular confidence. An establishing shot of an unoccupied, quiet Afghan hillside is rushed from all sides by marching troops. It cuts to a tracking shot of the soldiers’ boots pounding the Middle Eastern dirt, puddles splashing like mini-explosions. An industrial EDM track pulses as the camera makes its way into Vincent’s face. His visage violently shifts as he marches. This addled trudge is filmed in a shaky, handheld shot, and with great visual storytelling our protagonist is formed: here is a unstable psyche.
Once home, he picks up an odd job with a group of friends as security detail at a lavish party held at a rich Lebanese businessman’s lavish French estate, “Maryland.” Not much is divulged about any of the surrounding characters because Disorder is entirely told from the perspective of this PTSD-stunned soldier. The camera constantly has him in the frame. He is observant, always piecing together the scenes in front of him. At the party, he overhears strange, overtly political conversations that might lead one to believe some of the guests have ulterior motives. What’s really going on is unclear; all the information is filtered through Vincent. When he suspects things might go awry, we do as well. It’s unavoidable.
If this film had been shot in black-and-white, the party scenes – complete with a deluge, fully-clothed drunken swimming, and guests pouring inside from the rain – would be almost unmistakable from La Notte. Like that great Italian film, this is about fractured perception, yet here the central entity is not the union (or disunion) of marriage, it’s one man with a multivalent paranoia. There is a separation between protagonist and occurrence in Disorder. This is about an observer shaping the scenes he sees, whereas Antonioni rooted his film in the perspective of space and architecture. Antoninoni immerses the viewer into physical space; Winocour into a psyche. The marriage at La Notte’s center is dissected by how people stand and relate in certain proximities and geographies. Vincent’s plight becomes very one note because the plot and perspective allows only so much to be explored.
Things really become monotonous when Vincent begins to piece together information about the owner of “Maryland,” Whalid. Vincent ends up employed for a few extra days to serve as security guard for Whalid’s wife and son when he leaves town on business. Jessie – a reserved, yet grounding presence from Diane Kruger – is a beautiful German blond at least a decade younger than her husband. Vincent, and the audience, has been watching her since the party. He’s caught glimpses of her from the surveillance cameras when on security detail. He gazed from corners and angles, taking in her beauty and elegance. It’s clear he becomes obsessed. But if there is one target he wishes to protect from the eminent danger he foresees, it is her.
Disorder begins to unfold when Vincent, Jessie, and her son Ali shift from the confines of a La Notte-esque investigation of class through the PTSD-addled mind and into a pretty standard home invasion thriller. Unbridled and traumatized rage and paranoia have set the environment and mood throughout, which makes Vincent’s perceptions wholly unreliable, even when he is right. The invasion becomes a game of questioned intention and slowly ratcheting fear. Yet with no flesh to characterize Jessie and other peripheral characters, the stakes are inert. Despite Winocour’s expertise, the script simply underservices the approach.
As tension heightens, the single observant perspective’s effectiveness lessens. We certainly do experience the PTSD-rattled psyche. We feel the paranoia; we sense the strain. A soldier can leave the battleground but the warzone never leaves him. This is Disorder’s thesis, that the psychological effects of war and terror have seeped into and poisoned Vincent’s mind. Everything he experiences is filtered through it. Domestic space and relationship now replace the trenches. This invasion of terror is evident as Winocour makes it a point to punctuate her film with shots of surveillance cameras and television programs reporting gun violence or global terror. The fear of globalized warfare invades every nook and cranny. Unfortunately, Disorder’s staunch perspective is so introverted, so interior that I think the question must be asked, is there anything new or deep in this, or is it simply empty? This sick-psyche-of-our-modern-world film is evocative yet falls short of its thematic predecessors. It’s not the PTSD-filtered La Notte for the 21st century terrorized war parable it could’ve been.