It's certainly beautiful, as must be any movie featuring the outstanding cinematographer Agnès Godard and the criminally underacknowledged sound mixer Jean-Louis Ughetto. Most movies don't give us images as warm as Michel Subor drinking with a Pusan local or as vivid as a flashback to a boat's arrival at a French Polynesian island. But from the director of "Friday Night" and "Beau Travail," that's not enough.
Subor's character, Louis, is an intruder; various people are intruders in Louis's life (notably Béatrice Dalle); Louis even has an intruder inside his body - his transplanted heart. The heightening of Louis's condition, at first achieved through long looks at his huge chest scar, becomes absurdly literal when we see a bloody organ lying in the snow. All this is meant to make some vague point about rejection, and how communities and their outsiders relate to each other, but except in the Korean section and parts of the Tahitian one, Denis's use of photogenic isolated locations defeats her theme by not giving Louis enough human life to interact with. Perhaps I'm grading too harshly, but I expect great things from a Denis movie, and I didn't see them here.
