Critics reviews

It is a raw experience. No title, no credits of any sort. No soundtrack—although I defy anyone to watch it in absolute silence and not "hear" something, at some point, in their head. Just a series of "moving images" (for once the currently fashionable artworld term is correct), portraits in black-and-white, mostly trained on faces, or the upper parts of several bodies. There is no make-up, only minimal lighting and staging, and no post-production effects or clean-up whatsoever.

The film has both life—or if you prefer, _presence_, at its highest intensity—and style. The style comes in the way that Garrel shoots his subjects; I say this at the risk of stating the obvious, because without sound, narrative, or any significant action, all we have is the subjects and the way they are shot. But the film displays at once an extraordinary casualness and a very precise sense of form and composition.

Few films elicit as many satisfyingly divergent responses as "Les Hautes Solitudes"... The film's silence works as a kind of invitation, encouraging you to infer meaning and jump to conclusions as one image gives way to the next. You fill in the gaps between them, a process similar to how viewers create meaning through montage, shot by shot. The images in "Les Hautes Solitudes," though, seem more casually strung together than assembled for specific meanings.

Even if you weren't aware of Garrel's tumultuous history with Nico, you're obsessively staring at and trying to parse some very photogenic, dangerously attractive people, mostly women. You don't need to share Garrel's unapologetic gaze to feel its intensity; in its ambitious visual language, despite the modesty of means and methods, Les hautes solitudes comes off as an attempt to show objects of love in a way so transfigured that viewers themselves could begin to feel the same adoration.

The histrionics are kept to a minimum; the real drama of Les Hautes Solitudes, its power and allure, emerges when Seberg does very little but look directly at the camera... Les Hautes Solitudes is both ravishing portraiture and wordless biography, a life and aura distilled to glances and gestures.

The result is a haunting, dreamlike experience, all the more poignant in retrospect. Smiling appreciatively at the man behind the camera, Seberg nevertheless seems at the edge of an unfathomable sadness. (The title, translatable as "the lonely upper-crusts," might in this case connote "Lonely Celebrities" or "The Lonely Famous.") Long takes, mostly in close-up, reflect the patience and fascination of the filmmaker as much as the openness and willingness of his subject.

[It's part of] a rough trilogy of relationship dramas in which the overt text of the conflict is hidden from the viewer, forcing us to subsist on the muted effluvia of strained conversations and pained reactions thereto. This film remains the most powerful of the three, its stark transposition of distilled torment onto famous faces conducted in harsh, unvarnished black and white, granting a piercing clarity to its murky scenes of vaguely sketched misery.

Together Garrel and Seberg made Les Hautes Solitudes, a 35mm silent film in black and white, nearly entirely composed of close-ups, and an utterly unique cinematic experience. As a magnificent and haunting record of the female face, Les Hautes Solitudes reaches the same heights as Dreyer's work with Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.