Alice Winocour (2015)
In a story about a beautiful woman and her male bodyguard, you would normally expect (a) that he’ll have to fight off other men who mean to do her harm and (b) that a romantic and/or sexual relationship between the lady and the minder will ensue. Alice Winocour’s Disorder is an arty-farty bodyguard story. As a result, (a) appears to happen but we’re meant to be unsure if it’s all in the mind of Vincent, the psychologically troubled guard; the closest things get to (b) is in the final sequence, when he’s almost certainly imagining a woman’s embrace. Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a French soldier who has done duty in Afghanistan. He’s anxious to get back to military service but a conversation with a doctor in the film’s short opening scene makes clear that he’s unlikely to be passed medically fit to do so: Vincent is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. With a group of other between-tours soldiers, he gets work as a security guard. We see them working as a team at a reception at the luxury villa of Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp), a wealthy Lebanese businessman, on the French Riviera. When Whalid goes on a business trip (he’s an arms dealer), Vincent is hired to look after Whalid’s wife Jessie (Diane Kruger) and their young son Ali (Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant).
The early stages of Disorder are promising, particularly the reception at Maryland, the Whalids’ villa. (The film was released as Maryland in continental Europe.) Alice Winocour shows clearly and economically how the security guards are doubly unobtrusive. There to do a job, they professionally keep themselves in the background; the reception guests, unpleasantly indifferent, treat the guards as if they weren’t there – which Vincent clearly resents. This provides an effective bridge to the main part of the film. Winocour and Matthias Schoenaerts start to build a picture of a man who feels the need for human contact but can’t find a way of creating it (the same kind of predicament in which another discharged military veteran, Travis Bickle, found himself, in the first part of Taxi Driver). This is hinted at right from the start: when Vincent is in a minibus en route to Maryland with the other ex-soldiers, he seems cut off from them. Once it’s just him in the villa with Jessie and the child, we begin to see the distress that Vincent’s aloneness causes him.
It’s unfortunate that Alice Winocour is intent on turning Disorder into something artful in the pejorative sense: first, because the film’s tricksy details are too prominent and swamp the human drama; second, because Winocour, who wrote the screenplay with Jean-Stéphane Bron, gets so caught up in the technical possibilities of Vincent’s ‘disorder’ that the storytelling becomes as snarled up as his mind. The score by the French techno artist Gesaffelstein (real name Mike Lévy) pounds out the PTSD-induced disorientation inside Vincent’s head. The soundtrack gets across too that he may have suffered a degree of hearing loss that’s increased his sense of isolation. (Signs of disorder are more literally apparent on the outside of his body – the word ‘chaos’ is tattooed on the inside of his right forearm.) Winocour describes events in the villa from Vincent’s increasingly frazzled point of view but she’s either unsure or insufficiently bothered about how much of what he thinks is happening isn’t actually happening. If the audience was kept in a state of continuing uncertainty about this, we might share something of Vincent’s frightened confusion. But there are sequences that confirm – to the extent that they seem to reflect points of view other than Vincent’s – that the masked, armed men whom he sees and fights with in the villa aren’t entirely a post-Afghanistan nightmare product of his imagination. This makes the boundary between reality and fantasy not so much grippingly blurred as arbitrary.
After an incident when Vincent is driving Jessie and Ali to the beach, police protection on the villa is arranged but then inexplicably called off. Vincent contacts Denis (Paul Hamy), one of the other resting soldiers we met earlier on, who agrees to come to Maryland to provide back-up. Denis’s reappearance is welcome in more ways than one. His easy, flirting sociability with Jessica, which makes her laugh for the only time in the film, pulls Disorder back to its more interesting aspect: the impossibility for Vincent of getting through to another person. By now, though, the film is mostly frustrating, for the reasons suggested above. The black-clad intruders bring about a night of mayhem. The next morning, Denis drives Jessie and Ali to the airport. (They’re headed for Canada – Whalid’s return has been delayed indefinitely by his arrest in Switzerland.) Vincent stays behind and experiences the presence of a woman putting her arms round him. The moment is much more obviously delusory than anything that’s gone before – the woman’s embrace is wraithlike. Alice Winocour seems suddenly (and reasonably) anxious to ensure that we got the point that Vincent might have imagined other things. Given the overnight horrors that appeared to take place, the other characters’ low-key morning-after behaviour is noticeable – but no more than noticeable, since Diane Kruger’s Jessie, especially, hasn’t reacted much to anything throughout the film. The direction leaves the responsibility of humanising Vincent entirely with Matthias Schoenaerts – it’s lucky for Alice Winocour that he has broad shoulders as an actor and as a physical specimen. As in Bullhead, Schoenaerts’s power and bulk reinforce the sense of a barrier between his character and the rest of the world, and enable him to express a distinctive vulnerability. Paul Hamy gives a well-judged performance as Denis. As Ali, Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant is a persuasive combination of spoilt and innocent child.
31 March 2016
