Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Dumont

  • The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “Since its beginnings, many hundreds of thousands of Marines have prepared for war here, practicing their war-fighting skills in the challenging terrain and climate of the Mojave Desert. In the early days it was primarily seen as a place for artillery units to unmask devastating firepower in training. Subsequently, it has been home to numerous tenant commands, earning a reputation as the premier combined-arms training facility in the Marine Corps.”
    – History of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms (1)

    “The H1 and H2 were created to handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges. So, that’s just what the AM General Test Track in South Bend, Indiana serves up. On the same course where the U.S. Army and Allied Forces have trained drivers, you’ll face twisted, muddy terrain and also learn recovery techniques. Unfortunately, after the training is over, you will in fact, [sic] have to return to civilization.”
    – The Hummer Driving Academy (2)

    Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) begins amid the traffic of a congested Los Angeles freeway. David (David Wissak) is driving; Katia (Katia Golubeva), his girlfriend, rests in the back seat. They are leaving the city, headed east, deep into the Joshua Tree National Park, where David plans to scout locations for a film project. Once there, they settle quickly into routine: their days begin with a long trek into the desert, followed by a few hours of exploration and then the long drive back to Twentynine Palms, the small town where their motel is located. There they swim, have sex, shower, watch television, eat dinner, fight, and make up, in roughly that order. As in his previous films, La Vie de Jésus (1997) and L’Humanité (1999), here Dumont is interested in the mundane details of human experience. His camera lingers patiently on David and Katia’s bodies with a naturalist’s curiosity, capturing something of their boredom, their desire, their frustration, their jealousy, and their confused affection. (David, an American, and Katia, a Russian, converse in a mix of half-understood English and French.) Even in the final minutes of the film, when the Edenic isolation of the desert is ruptured by outside forces, Dumont refuses to quicken his pace. Audiences are forced to observe everything – the ordinary and the terrifying – unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylised photography. Dumont has once again given us “large and startling” figures and has left us to sort through the consequences (3).

    While Dumont’s “humanity under glass” approach to characters has carried through each of his films – Freddy and Marie, Pharaon and Domino, David and Katia are all similarly flayed under the director’s scalpel – his latest film marks something of a departure, as his move from the small French town, Bailleul, to the American southwest necessitates a new palette of cinematic iconography and, more significantly, a new socio-political context. Reviewers of Twentynine Palms have, almost without exception, called attention to the former, citing Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) as a few of the film’s most obvious forebears (4). But while appropriating “American film imagery”, as Dumont admits to deliberately doing, he also comments on that imagery, deconstructing the culturally-coded messages that each image carries. “I can’t understand half of what you’re saying”, David tells Katia, but he could as easily be speaking to Hitchcock’s motel room, John Ford’s desert mountains, and the heart of Boorman’s darkness. Hollywood’s visions of violence, cowboy masculinity, and the never-ending battle between good and evil have long been mythological tropes of America’s political identity (and they have obviously gained currency in the 21st century); in Twentynine Palms, Dumont calls attention to the artificiality of those tropes and to the dehumanising effects they mask. The end result is a film equal parts high-minded allegory and kick-in-the-guts sensation. Dumont, perhaps more than any living filmmaker, deliberately challenges audiences to reconcile those tensions, or, if not reconcile, to at least experience, in all its fullness and complexity, the sudden disorientation such tensions inevitably inspire.

    When all is said and done – after the endless driving, the pain-faced orgasms, the countless miscommunications, and the brutal, brutal violence – Twentynine Palms is, I think, really a film about a red truck. Specifically, it’s about David’s red H2, a sports utility vehicle modelled after the US Army’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (pronounced Humvee). Loaded with high-end comforts, including a nine-speaker sound system, DVD navigation, and standard leather seating, the “Hummer” is capable of producing 325 horsepower and 365 pounds of torque. Its welded steel frame, ten inch ground clearance, and 40 degree approach angle give it the appearance of being one of the toughest, most agile off-road vehicles on the market. “In a world where SUVs have begun to look like their owners, complete with love handles and mushy seats,” Hummer’s website announces, “the H2 proves that there is still one out there that can drop and give you 20.” But the H2, despite its rugged appearance, is little more than a new face on an old idea – a significantly modified version of General Motors’ oldest line of SUVs, the Chevy Suburban (a name thick with allegoric potential). The H2′s base price is just over US$50,000.

    There is a danger, of course, in pushing this metaphor too far. A truck driven more often through upscale neighbourhoods than over rocky terrain, a truck with an American military pedigree and a soccer dad clientele, a truck whose name was inspired by a euphemism for fellatio – the Hummer is ripe for juvenile Freudian analysis and for simplistic pronouncements about the ethical problems of the postmodern simulacrum. Had Dumont been less patient with his material, had he treated it with too little grace or honesty, Twentynine Palms would likely have collapsed under the weight of such a symbol, becoming not a study of, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil, but a banality itself. Dumont avoids that trap (for the most part) by calling little attention to the Hummer as symbol, with only a few notable exceptions. For instance, during their drives through the desert, David often stops to allow Katia to take the wheel. On one such drive, she scrapes paint from the side of the truck, then infantilises David by laughing at his anger. The brief conflict mirrors the gendered struggle that defines so much of their relationship, and it would not require too great a stretch to read David’s meticulous waxing of the Hummer as an attempt to reconstruct his masculine authority. (Welcome to Psychology 101, where “waxing a Hummer” is never just waxing a Hummer.)

    It’s the nature of that masculine authority, however, and the particularly American myths that determine it that seem of greatest import in the film. In the same California desert where novelist Frank Norris’s McTeague dies as a result of his greed and jealousy, where John Wayne eternally rides horses and fights “savages”, where the US Marines “unmask devastating firepower in training”, David adopts the appropriate pose, driving his army-like truck and fucking his beautiful girlfriend with a near-bestial desperation. “We can fuck and fuck, but we can’t merge”, Dumont says (somewhat disingenuously, I think) on the Blaq Out DVD release (R2), reducing David and Katia’s troubling relationship to a universal platitude. But David and Katia are not Adam and Eve, or Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina, or Freddy and Marie; they are characters trapped at the nexus of conflicted American types, old and new: rugged individuals and conspicuous consumers, democratic liberals and unilateral militarists, Western gunslingers and West Coast hipsters. Is it any wonder they’re both a touch schizophrenic?

    Unlike, say, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), with its satiric commingling of images of American military power, “Old West” masculinity and myths of redemptive violence, Twentynine Palms consigns many of its targets to spaces just beyond the edge of the screen. The most striking example is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, which is alluded to only in the title of the film and in one key sequence. While eating ice cream, David notices Katia admiring a Marine in uniform. “You wouldn’t want me to shave my head like them?” he asks. She laughs, then tells him, “If you do, I’ll leave you”, but her answer offers David little comfort. Katia admits to finding Marines “really handsome”, and her laughter – to David, at least – is patronising. He sulks, then launches into a tirade about their conversations lacking a “logical progress”, before she interrupts him with the words, “I love you”. Tellingly, he responds, “I want you”. (The film’s dialogue, though cliched at times, does work a bit better on screen than when transcribed.)

    David’s thin frame, shag haircut, and fashionably-dishevelled wardrobe put him in stark contrast to the “proud, fighting men of the US Marines” who surround the periphery of Twentynine Palms. Alone with Katia, however, he (over)compensates for any apparent lack. Dumont’s cinematographic style is never more clinical and his worldview more deterministic than in his stagings of sex. Not only do David and Katia never truly “merge”, but each appears barely cognisant of the other’s presence. Bodies become entangled; orgasms are loud, primal. Sex, for Dumont, is an act of self-gratifying violence predicated on domination. “The poor thing”, Katia says after David describes an episode of The Jerry Springer Show in which a father admits to sexually abusing his daughter. David’s casual response – “Who?” – is perhaps the film’s most chilling moment, for it portends something more base and destructive than the “desensitising effects of the media” against which cultural critics on both the left and the right rage (though that is certainly one element of Dumont’s critique). David’s nihilism puts him closer in line with the morally ambiguous heroes of Hollywood’s Old West: Ethan Edwards (John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956) and Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, 1992), for example – men who kill because they can. In David’s case – and, again, at the risk of slipping headlong into bad Freud – sex and murder have become indistinguishable; the symbolic Colt revolver has been replaced quite literally by the signified, and David, to borrow from Bill Munny, has always been “lucky in the order”.

    Lucky, that is, until the final minutes of the film. Twentynine Palms ends with two acts of outrageous violence that, even upon first viewing, feel both genuinely shocking and strangely inevitable. During their final drive through the desert, David and Katia are chased and brought to a stop by three men who pull them from their truck, beat them, and sodomise David. After a three-minute, agonising shot of Katia crawling naked toward David, Dumont cuts to the motel room, where they have returned, alive but badly injured. David refuses to call the police, presumably because of his shame, and sends Katia to fetch dinner. When she returns, he emerges suddenly from the bathroom, pins her to the bed, and repeatedly stabs her. The final image is a long, high-angle shot of the desert. David is naked, facedown in the sand, dead, the Hummer parked beside him. A police officer wanders near the body, and we hear his voice as he calls for an ambulance.

    Were the film to end ten minutes earlier, with David and Katia still driving, still miscommunicating, still struggling to capture a glimpse of some impossible communion, Twentynine Palms would be another in a line of cinematic meditations on modern alienation, more L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) or Vive l’amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994) than Psycho. The seemingly random brutality of the violence, however, and the symbolically-charged manner in which it is staged, shift the film much closer to the realm of socio-political allegory. In that sense, the “attack” sequence is key. As in a classic Old West ambush, the savages appear from nowhere. Aside from a few early glimpses, David and Katia are unaware of their menacing white truck until it rear-ends them and forces them to a stop. The sequence might be boiled down to three shots. The first is a low-angle image of David’s face. He’s looking back over his right shoulder, screaming, helpless to stop the attackers’ truck from pushing their own. The look on David’s face is familiar to us by now, having already seen it on several occasions during his sexual climaxes. The second is a long shot of the two trucks coming to rest. Dumont films it from behind and to one side such that the perspective becomes slightly distorted. David’s H2 – the militaryish SUV designed to “handle deep water, nasty side slopes, inclines and harrowing vertical ledges” – suddenly resembles a toy beside the attackers’ massive pickup truck. The third is the image of David being raped, his bloodied face buried in the sand. Dumont positions the two men beside the back of the Hummer, which, metaphorically speaking, has also been sodomised. Not coincidentally, the attacker is also shot from a low-angle, and his face also contorts with a scream when he ejaculates.

    At a moment when depictions of American violence, both real and imagined, tend to be commodified (as in the Hummer) or hyperstylised (as in The Matrix [Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999]) or sanitised for our protection (as in television coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), Dumont’s treatment is relatively unfiltered and uncompromising. Audiences are subjected to long takes of “real” brutality; the director only subtly imposes his editorial voice to guide the viewing. In a film that plays so self-consciously with America’s mythologies, that experience is genuinely disconcerting, for it deconstructs those myths by accosting viewers with unfiltered sensation, the best remedy, Dumont implies, for intellectual distance and moral apathy. Twentynine Palms fits comfortably into the “art film” genre, and, as such, it will likely be appreciated by those most willing to rationally dissect its network of symbols and allusions. The textbook psychosexual connotations of the attack sequence, for example, are just too overt to be ignored. And yet, watching a Bruno Dumont film is, first and foremost, a visceral experience. We are forced to sit uncomfortably and observe the beating and rape of two people, fighting all the while the learned urge to avert our eyes. Thus, when David springs from the bathroom and savagely murders Katia, we might, in a somewhat detached manner, explain it away with allusions to Lacan and the dissolution of the fictional unity of David’s masculine subjectivity (and his failed attempt to reconstruct it through violence and the shaving of his head); but the more immediate sensation is horror – horror at the spectre of violence, horror at the depravity of its nihilism, horror at the sudden realisation that so many of America’s defining tropes have made of such violence a point of pride and national unity. In that sense, Twentynine Palms is timely and urgent in a way that Dumont’s earlier (and, in my opinion, better) films are not. His appeal to transcendence is now grounded in history, at a moment when America’s myths are being written on the world.

    Endnotes

    1. See MCAGCC/MAGTFTC History and Unit Information, accessed July 2004.
    2. http://www.hummer.com
    3. See my article, “Bruno Dumont’s Bodies”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, March–April 2002.
    4. I would add the “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) as well. Notice how David crouches ape-like in the desert, his knees above his waist, and how Dumont films the murder, the knife rising and falling like the bone in Kubrick’s film.

  • A (Very) Few Words on Twentynine Palms

    When all is said and done — after the endless driving, the explicit sex, the pain-faced orgasms, and the brutal, brutal violence — Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, I think, is really a film about a red truck.

    A much longer response is in the works.

  • Film Trip

    Film Trip

    I spent the weekend in Annapolis with my folks. By coincidence, I was there while the Annapolis Chorale was staging Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, accompanied by a stunning 35 mm print of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Passion live was quite an experience. I would guess that there were about 400 in attendance, which was a pleasant surprise. Nice to see the arts supported so strongly in my old home town.

    I think that Einhorn’s score, while beautiful in its own right, is occasionally a bit too much for Dreyer’s film. There are several scenes, particularly near the end, that work better in silence. But, all in all, it was really well done. The four soloists were exceptional — all were visitors, I think, from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore — and the Annapolis Chorale was more than up to the challenge. My only gripe was with the first cellist, who muffed a few of his solos.

    The 35mm print was better than I had expected. I felt like I was watching the Criterion disc. Seeing it with an audience was really interesting, though. I could feel some resistance at first — particularly from the moron sitting beside me, who tried to entertain his girlfriend by mocking Dreyer’s more stylized images — but for the last twenty minutes, many in the crowd were literally pitched forward in their seats. The best measure of its power, though, was the relative silence of the audience as they filed out of the auditorium. My parents and I were in the car, pulling out of the parking lot, before we said anything.

    An hour before the program, the chorale director gave a short lecture on the film and score. Not much new to share, but he did add something to the story of the mysterious print that was discovered in an asylum. Apparently the print was found with a short printed program that included a brief plot synopsis and cast list. They think that one of the doctors in residence may have been a film buff who requested prints for occasional public viewings, a la Bazin’s cine-clubs. If so, I can certainly understand why he would have stored away a copy of Passion for himself.

    On Saturday, I delivered my Dumont paper to a small but enthusiastic group at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference. The other papers were really interesting. The first used Varda as a test case for the possibility of contemporary auteur studies. It included clips from her first film, La Pointe Courte (1956), which looks fascinating — a transition piece from Neo-Realism to New Wave. The presenter, Richard Neupert from U of Georgia, said that he met Varda recently and reported that she is presently involved in restoring her own films and is very enthusiastic about DVD. Hopefully more of her catalog is on the way.

    The other paper was delivered by a Master’s student in the film studies program at Emory, who spoke about American marketing of European filmmakers during the last decade and a half. I wasn’t too interested in her test case, Amelie, but I was surprised to learn that my enthusiasm for foreign films can be attributed, at least in part, to the Weinsteins. She analyzed Miramax’s marketing campaigns for films like Delicatessen and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, which were the very films that piqued my interest in the late-80s, early-90s. Her conclusion was that, right now, the only foreign films that stand a chance in American markets are those that already conform to American conventions — films that can be pitched as “feel good” instead of “risky” or “provocative,” which remained the model even only ten years ago. We all sat around and chatted afterwards and wondered if DVD has completely changed the distribution channels. Folks like Dumont and the Dardennes find their audiences in homes instead of at the theater.

  • Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “For the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”
    — Flannery O’Connor

    In the “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman boldly proclaims the scope of his project: the forging of a distinctly American poetic tradition. For Whitman, the genius of America can be found in the “common people. Their manners speech dress friendships [sic] — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy . . . these too are unrhymed poetry” (712). His proclamation marked a radical departure from earlier forms and secured his position as the poet laureate of American romanticism. By elevating emotion over intellect and the wild and natural over the tamed, Whitman assaulted his readers, forcing them to abandon pretense and acknowledge their shared humanity and the moral responsibility that accompanies it.

    Echoes of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” can now be heard in the work of French filmmaker, Bruno Dumont, who turned from academia to the cinema out of a need to reconnect with people. Speaking of his first feature, La vie de Jésus (1997), Dumont contrasts his own approach to filmmaking with the ‘cerebral’ navel-gazing that he feels characterizes much of contemporary French cinema:

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. . . . The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. (Walsh)

    Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a democratic spirit, celebrating the “common people” in all of their rich complexity. In La Vie de Jésus and its follow-up, L’Humanité (1999), Dumont has restored . . . well . . . humanity to the screen, and in doing so, has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. Instead of simply turning a hand-held camera on ‘real people’ living ‘real lives,’ a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television, he has, like Whitman, rediscovered the transcendent and the beautiful in the common, by giving us stunning and often shocking images of the body—here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic—and by forcing us to respond truthfully and viscerally to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. Dumont’s films slowly erode the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. For Dumont, wrestling with the intellectual and political consequences of that emotional response remains an essential but always secondary step. It should come as little surprise that L’Humanité was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes in 1999, while Sam Mendes’s American Beauty—a film that, in many ways, adopts a strangely similar humanist stance—won a Best Picture Oscar the following year. It appears the majority of audiences have surrendered the ability to recognize sincerity (or, perhaps it has atrophied), objecting loudly when asked to do so. Instead, audiences either opt for or are steered toward easy satire and emotional distance, not to mention Kevin Spacey-sized performances to truthful ones. Ricky Fitts claims in Mendes’s film that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world that I feel like I can’t take it . . . and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of contemporary society’s manufactured emotions. Dumont refuses to let us off so easily.

    Central to Dumont’s project is his faith in the power of cinema to return us “to the body, to the heart, to truth.” That faith secures his position in the lineage of filmmakers whom he most admires: Rossellini, Bresson, Pasolini. I might also add to the list Tarkovsky, who, like Dumont, saw the cinematic image as a potential vehicle for the revelation of truth through the simultaneous experience of complex and contradictory emotions. (“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Whitman would laugh.) By privileging the audience’s instinctual, visceral responses, and by doing so within the assumed customs of contemporary European ‘art’ cinema (a questionable categorization, I realize), Dumont deliberately places his viewers in an exasperating position and dares them to find a way out: trained to ‘read’ the complex images of the art house with the intellectual rigor of something akin to New Criticism, they fall immediately into the trap of struggling to decode messages, unravel symbols, and impose order, often where little exists. Dumont, however, frustrates the viewer at every turn by lending those messages an impenetrable ambiguity. So instead, we are forced to confront the stunning complexity of emotions that his films wrestle from each of us: empathy/revulsion, desire/pain, longing/fear, awe/confusion, transcendence/alienation. For his films to touch our hearts and reveal truth, as he desires, they must first shake us free from our expectations by confronting our senses.

    That Dumont has succeeded in this, his first goal, is evidenced by the critical response to his work, which reads like a cinematic Rorschach test. The polarized voices that were heard most loudly at Cannes made their way into the pages of Sight and Sound by way of “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” a point/counter-point article in which Mark Cousins calls the film “one of the best . . . of the last ten years,” and Jonathon Romney responds by denouncing it as “an unsubtle film and a coercive one.” In separate reviews, Richard Falcon finds the end of La vie de Jésus “almost unbearably and inexplicably moving”; Stuart Klowans calls L’Humanité “off-putting and yet so immediate.”

    Dumont elicits these varied responses through a film style that combines the naturalistic, nonprofessional performances of social-realism with austere, Kubrick-like camerawork. As Tony Rayns remarks in his review of L’Humanité, and as most viewers have likely noticed, Dumont’s second feature is a “virtual remake” of its predecessor. Both are set in Bailleul, the small town in northern France where Dumont was raised and where he continues to reside. Both are concerned with the lives of the working class. And both display Dumont’s trademark cinematographic blend of lush widescreen landscapes, glossy-eyed close-ups, and clinically objective (and graphic) stagings of sex. [Brief plot synopses follow.]

    La vie de Jésus concerns the tragic fate of Freddy (David Douche), an unemployed twenty-something who spends his days collecting welfare checks and aimlessly riding his motorbike alone or with a gang of friends through town and the surrounding countryside. He lives there with his mother (Geneviève Cottreel), who is as disillusioned and as distant as he. Their first interaction, minutes into the film, is typical of their relationship: with Freddy standing before her, she stares past him at television coverage of an epidemic in Africa. “What a shame,” she sighs, responding to the visual messages on TV while ignoring those on her son’s face. Freddy’s only relief from the oppressive boredom comes from his participation in a marching band, his meticulous care for a pet finch, and his carnal relationship with Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), a young girl who works as a grocery cashier and who lives on Freddy’s otherwise vacant street. When Marie welcomes the attention of Kader, an Arab boy, Freddy retaliates violently, kicking him to death on the street.

    Like Freddy, the protagonist of L’Humanité lives alone with his mother in a working class section of Bailleul. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent, called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and child and that he seems to suffer from a heightened sensitivity to others’ emotional pain. He apparently has only one friend, a neighbor named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaon accompanies them to dinner and on a trip to the sea. He rides his bicycle, tends his garden, and improvises on his electric keyboard. Occasionally, he also devotes some energy to his investigation, and, by the end of the film, the case appears to be solved.

    When reduced to simple plotlines, both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité sound like standard fare: one a social drama concerning disillusioned youth, the other a classic police procedural. They diverge most radically from the norm, though, in their treatment of their ‘heroes’, a label I feel comfortable applying to Freddy and Pharaon only because Dumont clearly sees them as such. They are heroes born of the same stock as Hemingway’s, Eliot’s, and Antonioni’s: characters desperate to discover communion, beauty, and purpose in an alienating and amoral world. Dumont reminds us constantly of their brutal plight by lingering on shots of their bodies, which appear broken and almost grotesquely malformed. Freddy’s body is scarred by frequent falls from his motorbike and is ravaged by epileptic seizures. He is like a younger version of Pharaon, whose sunken chest, stooped shoulders, and hollow eyes lend him the appearance of a man twice his age.

    Dumont’s characters are, in fact, ‘embodied’ by their physiognomies. The director spent ten months casting L’Humanité, then recreated his original ‘prototype’ characters based on the performers’ specific appearance and mannerisms. “I directed them based on what came from within them,” he has said. “I observed their body language and composed my shots around it” (Erickson). One recurring motif in both films is a medium close-up that positions the actor horizontally within the Scope frame, usually in a side view from the chest up. The shots typically last ten to fifteen seconds with little movement and only diegetic sound. For instance, near the end of La vie de Jésus, when he is notified by a police inspector that Kader has died during the night, Freddy sits hunched over in a chair, glancing up slowly to acknowledge the news. As in much of the second half of the film, Freddy is shirtless. The pronounced scratches on his shoulders and arms and the positioning of his body lend him the appearance of one being flogged. A similar image occurs in L’Humanité, when Pharaon leans over to work the soil in his garden.

    Dumont’s broken heroes personify his idealized vision of “the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of . . . emotion.” Both Freddy and Pharaon are, on several occasions, overwhelmed by swells of inarticulate rage. Twice, Freddy lashes out by silently kicking a brick wall. In both instances, Dumont frames him in a long shot, suggesting that these outbursts are as much a part of his routine existence as are his moped rides and band practices. Likewise, the most powerful moment in L’Humanité comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream that is eventually drowned out by the noise of a passing train. A “barbaric yawp,” indeed.

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanité is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. The movie detective is an archetypal Western hero: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy for others of which, Dumont suggests, very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity—to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it—but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body. Dumont reinforces Pharaon’s longing for connection by again lingering on shots of the body, but now from Pharaon’s subjective point of view: his boss’s sweat-soaked neck, his mother’s hand as she peels potatoes, Domino’s and Joseph’s bodies in the throes of sex, his own hand as he pets a nursing sow.

    This desperate pursuit of human connection is universal in Dumont’s world. Even Joseph and Domino, whose relationship is obviously driven by sex, are drawn together by some instinctive, biological need. Dumont does not censure this primal urge, though. In fact, again like Whitman, his controversial treatment of sex—including a penetration shot in La vie de Jésus —tears down the socio-religious barriers that often prevent us from acknowledging the base desires (words suddenly stripped of their negative connotations) that fuel so much of our behavior. Dumont does suggest, however, that a higher order of connection is attainable, but not without difficulty and sacrifice. In an outdoor cafe scene, we watch as Domino attempts to reach Joseph. She sits silently for several seconds before finally whispering, “I love you.” He’s able to respond only by stroking her hand, then Dumont cuts quickly to a shot of them having sex. A similar moment occurs in La vie de Jésus, when Freddy and Marie float over the countryside on a sightseeing chairlift. “Do you love me, Fred?” she asks. “Sure, I love you. Forever.” They kiss, but both appear more at ease in their embrace than in conversation. When they talk, they sit as far removed from one another as their chair will allow.

    The scene on the chairlift is notable because it exemplifies Dumont’s cinematographic style. Seeing his films for the first time, one is left a bit shaken by the graphic sexuality, by the brutality of the violence, and by the absurdity of his heroes. This, again, is the first goal of his project: to elicit a truthful emotional response from the viewer, even if that response is revulsion. But there’s also a formal beauty in Dumont’s films, a beauty that becomes more pronounced with subsequent viewings. During Freddy and Marie’s chairlift ride, Dumont cuts frequently to their subjective points of view. We see, from their perspective high above the ground, another of Dumont’s trademark images: an extreme long shot of the landscape, the widescreen frame divided by land and sky. The motif recurs with considerable frequency in both films, perhaps most notably in the opening of L’Humanité, a static shot that lasts nearly a minute as we watch Pharaon, dwarfed by the immense landscape, run from one side of the frame to the other.

    Dumont’s attention to landscapes, specifically, and to the natural world, in general, again harkens to Tarkovsky, who saw humanity’s increasing alienation from nature as symptomatic of its tragic loss of divine faith. Dumont has denied any personal belief in the existence of God, but has admitted to a fascination with the human history of Christ, evidenced most clearly in the title of his first film. In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Dumont’s camera acts as a mystical agent, offering the audience a glimpse of the transcendent that remains just beyond the reach of his characters. My favorite moment in these films comes just after one of Freddy’s epileptic seizures. He is with his friends, standing beside a road outside of town, when his body seizes, jerking him to the ground. The camera begins near eye level in a medium shot, but then cranes up slowly, rocking slightly from side to side as it climbs, floating over the boys until finally settling on another landscape. It’s a moment of breath-taking beauty that unites Dumont’s preoccupations with the body, the heart, and truth.

    A similar mystical effect is created by Dumont’s frequent subjective shots of the sky, which seem to embody, visually and emotionally, his characters’ search for meaning, a search that is then transferred to the viewer. The first of such shots occurs early in L’Humanité: upon hearing of the rape and murder of the young girl, Domino turns her gaze to the sky, as if searching for some explanation for the abominable act. Thirty minutes later, Dumont echoes that scene, when Joseph and Pharaon stand together, staring out at the sea. Hearing a voice, they both look back and to the sky, where they see Domino looking down at them from atop an old fort. By placing Domino in the position that we might assume to be filled by God (or fate or any number of mystical guiding principles), Dumont lends the image an ambiguity that refuses simplistic resolution.

    The same could be said of a scene near the end of La vie de Jésus, when Marie and Kader seek privacy in a section of a park that “smells like piss.” Finally alone, Marie embraces Kader and asks for his forgiveness. He looks upward, then, after a cut on an eye-line match, we see the sky as if through his eyes. It’s a beautifully complex sequence, one obviously rife with New Testament allusion. Much of the scene’s power is generated by a lovely close-up of Marie’s face pressed against Kader’s shoulder, a shot to which Dumont returns throughout L’Humanité in Pharaon’s many strange embraces. That beauty, and the potential connection that it seems to suggest, is tempered, though, by the aura of inevitable violence that surrounds the couple. The embrace is a desperate gesture for Marie, and one that, even after repeated viewings, I can only explain by acknowledging the powerful desperation I experience sympathetically each time I watch it.

    In “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Flannery O’Connor defends her preoccupation with grotesque characters and absurd situations by claiming, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” (806). A devout Catholic, O’Connor wanted to awaken her readers from the apathy and intellectual arrogance that blinded them to God’s presence in their lives, to force them to experience what Herman Melville called the “shock of recognition.” In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Bruno Dumont confronts his viewers from a similar tack. The final skyward glance in La vie de Jésus is Freddy’s. After escaping from the police station and once again wrecking his motorbike, he lies rigid on his back, hidden by tall grass. Dumont’s camera stares down at him as the scene begins to darken, leading us to expect another fade to black. Instead, he cuts to Freddy’s view of clouds drifting across the sun. What follows are two images that return us once again to the body: first, a close-up of an ant walking across his skin (a similar shot occurs in L’Humanité); then, a shot of his hands, dirty and broken beyond their years. As with the notorious final sequence of L’Humanité —Pharaon sits alone, inexplicably handcuffed, after Joseph has been accused of the murder—Dumont leaves Freddy’s fate unresolved. And we are left to wrestle with the consequences. I can’t rationally explain Pharaon’s behavior, nor Freddy’s. Dumont’s world, like O’Connor’s, is recognizable but distorted, heightened, surreal, which might also describe the way I feel when the credits roll: overwhelmed by the experience, but strangely alive to the possibility of something more.

    Works Cited

    Cousins, Mark, and Jonathon Romney. “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” Sight and Sound 10.9 (2000): 22-25.

    Erickson, Steve. “Oh, the Humanité!” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Time Out New York June 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Falcon, Richard. “La Vie de Jesus/The Life of Jesus.” Rev. of La Vie de Jesus, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 8.9 (1998): 55.

    Klawans, Stuart. “Columbo This Isn’t.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. The Nation. 10 July 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Flannery O’Connor: Selected Works. Ed. by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998. 801-06.

    Rayns, Tony. “L’Humanite.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 10.10 (2000): 46-47.

    Walsh, David. “Interview with Bruno Dumont, Director of The Life of Jesus.” 20 Oct. 1997. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Norton, 1973.

  • L’Humanite (1999)

    L’Humanite (1999)

    Dir. by Bruno Dumont

    Images: Dumont’s style could perhaps be described as a more polished verite. He uses only diegetic sound and shoots non-professional actors in stunning compositions and with impressive grace. Most striking images are those that foreground the “fleshiness” of characters. For instance, we ocassionally enter Pharaon’s POV as he stares at the back of the inspector’s neck or at his mother’s hand. Later, the camera lingers on a close-up of Pharaon, forcing us to listen attentively to his breathing. The explicit and unsentimental staging of sex between Domino and Joseph serves a similar purpose.

    • • •

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. The spectator must think. He has a lot of work to do. The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. [He] has something that I’ve lost, that I must find again, I don’t know what exactly. I find that our culture, our civilization, has failed politically, socially, morally.

    — Bruno Dumont

    Walt Whitman would be proud.

    It’s remarkable to hear echoes of Whitman in the voice of a contemporary filmmaker, but there he is, still singing the “body electric” and sounding his “barbaric yawp.” Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a Democratic spirit, celebrating the “common man” (for lack of a better term) in all of his rich complexity. Although I’ve always found the county/city dichotomy a bit reductive, I applaud Dumont’s devotion to it here, for it’s as radical a statement in cinema today as it was when Whitman staked his claim on verse with Leaves of Grass.

    Dumont is, of course, not totally without peer — Abbas Kiarostami is the closest kin to come to mind —but, in L’Humanite, he has made a landmark film that, ultimately, restores . . . well . . . humanity to the screen. In doing so, he has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. He has not simply turned a shaky camera on “real people” living “real lives,” a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television. He respects his characters, his form, and his audience too much to cheapen them in that way. Instead, like Whitman, he gives us stunning and occasionally shocking images of the body — here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic — and requires us to respond genuinely to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. L’Humanite slowly erodes the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. It should come as little surprise that Dumont’s film was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes, while Sam Mendes’ American Beauty — a film that, in many ways, adopts a similar humanist stance — won an Academy award. We seem to have surrendered our ability to recognize sincerity, opting instead for easy satire and emotional distance (not to mention “larger than life” performances over truthful ones). Ricky Fitts claims, in American Beauty, that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of our manufactured emotions. L’Humanite doesn’t let us off so easy.

    Dumont establishes the tone of L’Humanite in its opening scene, a static long shot of the French countryside, which lasts nearly a minute. Across the horizon, we see a small figure running from one edge of the frame to the other. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent in a small French town, who is called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11 year old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and his child. He seems to have only one friend, a woman named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier).

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanite is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. Movie detectives are typical of most Western heroes: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy of which very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity — to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it — but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body (a too frequent substitute these days).

    The most powerful moment in L’Humanite comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream. It is a moment of pure, inarticulate emotion unlike anything I have ever experienced from a film. That scream alone makes L’Humanite more real, more painful, and more affecting than any other film I’ve seen from the 90s. A barbaric yawp, indeed.