Flandern

Whether you like the films of Bruno Dumont or not, one thing is certain - you never forget them. Films such as La Vie de Jesus and L'Humanité have an elemental power that challenge us to confront the sickness of the soul that comes from denying our capacity to be and act human. Dumont's latest film Flanders, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2006, has the same acute powers of observation, slow and careful revelation of character, and insight into the human condition that characterized his first two films. Like La Vie de Jesus, Flanders is a film that deals with sexual and racial tension and marginal young people whose lives mirror the emptiness of the rural countryside in which the film is set.

The first two words of the film are the "f" word and the "s" word, which set the tone for what is to follow. Demester (Samuel Boidin), a burly local works on a farm and is having a passionless relationship with Barbe (Adélaide Leroux), a girl from a neighboring farm. True to Dumont's oeuvre, sex is joyless and mechanical and neither partner expresses affection. There is little dialogue and no musical score, only sounds of nature, the clumping of boots through the forest, and the grunting and pumping that suggest the sex act. The expressions on the faces of the characters are as vacant as the surrounding countryside and no director in the world can better convey a sense of pervasive emptiness than Bruno Dumont.

At a local pub, Demester matter-of-factly denies that he and Barbe are a couple, prompting Barbe to react by going off with a stranger, Blondel (Henri Cretel) to have sex and it soon becomes apparent that she has a reputation in the village for promiscuity. Demester and Blondel's fate will intertwine however. Both are in the same regiment called up to fight an unnamed war in a distant country that looks like the North Africa of Claire Denis'Beau Travail. It is not clear if the fighting is meant to reflect the War in Iraq, the French adventure in Algeria, or perhaps a European war yet to be fought. When the soldiers arrive they walk through a trench, possibly a vision of World War I in Flanders field, immortalized in the poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.

Dumont shows us war in its ultimate depravity including rape, murder of children, castration, and other brutalities. It is as if years of the soldier's sexual tensions and lack of emotional connection has exploded in a callous way, reflective of the torture of Iraqi's at Abu Ghraib. As his buddies die one by one at the hands of dark-skinned guerilla fighters, it becomes obvious that Demester will not lift a finger to save or protect them, a witness to his inability to access what FDR used to call, "that quiet, invisible thing called conscience". As the guerilla fighting in the streets and houses intensify, there is a war going on at home also. Barbe becomes pregnant and has a mental breakdown that lands her in a psychiatric hospital. Soon the war will be fought on two fronts.

Flanders has been called an anti-war film but the war seems to take place mostly on an internal level. It is expressionistic and poetic, a film that unfolds as if in a dreamscape that has no past, present, or future. You cannot appreciate Flanders by thinking about it, but only by feeling it, viscerally, in your blood. After showing mankind at its most vile in order to, in the director's own words, "relieve us of those urges", Dumont grants us a catharsis. Like unemployed, uneducated, and epileptic 20-year old Freddy in La Vie de Jesus whose vision of the sun after a brutal murder heralded an awakening, in his barn after the war's end, Demester recognizes the truth of the gaping wounds in his own soul and opens himself to the possibility of grace.

Bruno Dumont seems to have an obsession for depicting his fellow French citizens in some pretty dark & dismal situations. Thankfully, this makes for some edgy,concise drama. Although I walked away major disappointed with the last film of his I saw (The Twenty Nine Palms), this made up for it in spades. The plot concerns the tentative relation ship between a farm hand (Samuel Boidin),and the local town slut (Adelaide Leroux),who's screwing everybody in the local phone book. Andre has been called to the Army to fight in a war in a non specific area (Iraq?). Andre soon finds out about the hell that is war,while Barbe deals with her own demons. If you've ever seen any of Dumont's other films will know that he doesn't make things easy for his audiences (sex that is depicted in his films is generally unerotic,if not downright ugly to watch,plus violence is never approached with restraint). If you've managed to make it this far, 'Flandres',although unpleasant to watch,is none the less,a film well worth checking out.

What is surprising in this film is the way the director uses a very simple minimalistic style of telling a story to cope with one of the most important themes of the contemporary world - the involvement of the young people in Western countries in wars that happen in the third world. This is the story of two young men from some rural place in Northern France or French speaking Belgium who are sexually involved with the same girl before being sent to fight a war in a remote Islamic country. The girl has her own mental problems and has an abortion while the young men face all possible horrors of war, face death, commit and are subjected to unimaginable violence. All is told in very simple, well filmed and clear images, and this creates a strong emotional impact. With simple cinematographic tools the director sends a message of distress and pain about the conflicts human beings are subjected to in the world today. Worth watching.

It's remarkable that this film is not more popular. It successfully strips away the veneer of "civilisation" (false morality, good manners etc) and shows people as selfish, brutal animals, and depicts modern, asymmetrical warfare as a terrible nightmare where a group of brutish white thugs rape and murder a terrified, technologically backward society (nearly all of whom are defenceless/ poorly armed women and children) before finally being made to suffer a grim but deserved humiliation for their actions. Oh, actually, what am I saying? It'll be a bloody surprise if it ever comes out in North America properly, given the hypocritical, righteous atmosphere of self-delusion that currently permeates this society, a society underpinned by exactly the kind of abuse and violence that this film describes.

This film is about a group of young men going off to war. In this far away land, they leave marks to themselves and to the enemies by their lack of morality.

I guess I have to be in a certain mood to enjoy this film. It is highly minimalistic, as it has no soundtrack or extravagant sets. The pacing is extremely slow. It basically features people walking around half the time (and I am very serious), with occasional highly disturbing scenes interspersed in the second half of the film. There is very little dialog in it, and many dramatic scenes are very minimally delivered. For example, the helicopter rescue scene, it could have been made a real drama and thriller but it was so minimal. Flandres could have been a moving tale of morality, but instead tested my endurance.