FRENCH DIRECTOR BRUNO DUMONT’S PROVOCATIVE MEDITATION ON MANKIND’S CAPACITY FOR LOVE AND HATE, AWARDED THE GRAND PRIX AT CANNES LAST YEAR, MARKS ANOTHER FORTHRIGHT CELLULOID STATEMENT BY ONE OF THE MOST POLARISING FIGURES IN TODAY’S INTERNATIONAL MOVIE ARENA.
Here he revisits the bleak northern French farmlands of La Vie de Jesus(1997) and L’Humanite(1999), and the result is another deliberately minimal story of rural lives and loves. Glowering farmhand Demester (Samuel Boidin) meets Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) for wordless couplings in the woods, and although she gives every impression of cow-like passivity, she’s not quite so thick-skinned as all that. His inward-looking perspective is to be challenged when, with several other local lads, he’s drafted off to war. Under the heat of a desert sun, atrocity and counter-atrocity are played out in timeless fashion. If he survives, Demester will be a changed man.
Given the Arabic-speaking foes, it’s tempting to connect the carnage with ongoing events in the Middle East, but Dumont’s shots of French soldiers on horseback would seem to indicate a wider perspective than contemporary specifics. In the same way, the stripped-down dialogue and portentous framing of the scenes back in the French countryside are selfconsciously at some remove from the familiarities of psychological realism. Like Robert Bresson before him, Dumont is trying to get at the essence of our experience: men plough, mate, kill. His methods defy convention and divide opinion, but this dogged, awkward iconoclast continues to expand our horizons of what cinema can or should be. —Trevor Johnston.