La Humanidad

After seeing L'Humanite at the Edinburgh festival, it's difficult to imagine it winning the Cannes Grand Jury Prize as well as the best actor and actress awards. The film is an unquestionably beautiful but otherwise unremarkable example of French cinema. Call me a stuffy American, but I found the opening sequence of the rape victim's damaged body to be completely unnecessary. The film's title is the most pretentious in recent memory.

It is said that Humanite is not for everyone. And i would surely support that claim since I am a steward in the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and had to get up, about every two minutes to open the door to someone sneaker.

Still, I managed to get quite a clear impression of the film which is in my opinion a superb one. Although many people find themselves puzzled by the characters (virtually everyone in the show i attended came out of the cinema looking almost personally insulted by the film) i think that if you know and love Dostoevsky's books you won't find them so hard to understand. Pharaon is simply Prince Mishkin. He is assulted by the bluntness and cruelness of existence and the crime he tries to solve - but is overwhelmed with humility, love and compassion to the world. While his friend make love in a way that seems almost like a rape he makes love to the world, to the clods of the earth. When he rides his bicycle his upper body seems to be moving as if he was making love. But most of all he feels diligent compassion to the world and it's assaulters. The film shows the violence everywhere. Pharaon sees this violence and with his deep gaze manages to disarm it (with protesters and with Domino). I think that Pharaon is a really great acting performance. Pharaon like Mishkin in Dostoevky's notebooks 'sees not in the faces of people but in their hearts.'. The investigation taking place is like an investigation of the inner self. Of the human soul, of humanity. It's a category against Humanity and Pharaon's who is the categor manages to find compassion to humanity. Its sort of like an 'apocalypse now' in rural france.

The French writer-director Bruno Dumont achieves something rarely accomplished since TAXI DRIVER and ERASERHEAD: a way of looking at the world entirely afresh. Unlike those movies--or the recent, Expressionist CLEAN, SHAVEN--Dumont doesn't distort the physical world, make it elastic or dreamlike. But he somehow makes us feel the world is being recorded by a very wise child from another planet. Everything, absolutely everything, from human behavior to wind rippling over a field of grass, is seen as never before. Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new" is stamped on every frame.

Pharaon is a slow-witted police superintendent who is anything but pharaonic. He had a girlfriend and a baby, now dead. (We are not told how.) He is friends with Domino, a big-boned, sensitive, slatternly woman next door, and Joseph, her handsome beau, with whom she seems to never stop having sex. In their small town, a little girl has been raped and murdered. Pharaon pursues this case, as he pursues a sort of inarticulate love for Domino. Along the way, a light dawns in Pharaon--a dreadful light. He becomes sensitive to the suffering of all living things--a pig hurt by the suckling of her young, all the way to a motorist getting a beating outside police headquarters. The effect this has is to create a kind of moral schizophrenia in Pharaon: he can filter out nothing. Like an overlap of Raskolnikov and Prince Mishkin, Pharaon takes both the world's sin and sufferings on his back.

But this gives only the barest outline of the experience of L'HUMANITE, which is not about its plot. Indeed, the relationship of Dumont's handling of the materials of cinema to the story itself is unique in my experience of narrative moviemaking. Like Abbas Kiarostami in his recent work, Dumont uses the landscape not to illustrate the story, but to propose a dialectic against it. Where the landscape acts as an argument for life in Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY, here it does something else. It vibrates with feeling. In its childlike gaze at the hardness of people and things, L'HUMANITE tries to get at the shifting feelings underneath--the emotions and sensations so elusive there are no words for them. The movie proves that literary means--finding names--are unnecessary. Dumont finds aural-visual-rhythmic means to voice those emotions.

His techniques can be daring, appalling. Pharaon, gradually overwhelmed by the world's thousand and one cruelties, starts to spontaneously embrace (relative) total strangers, in scenes one can imagine giving audiences giggles. Dumont doesn't care.

L'HUMANITE is the kind of movie that, while you're watching it, you feel can drive you crazy in places, but which you know you'll live with and re-play in your head for the rest of your life. And Cannes naysayers to the contrary, all the performances in this movie--all of them, down to the tiniest--are perfect.

A note: I would like to thank the other people who wrote about L'HUMANITE on IMDB. With no other movie have I felt I learned so much by reading other people's responses, and particularly noting the details they chose to underline. For the authenticity and unabashedness of everyone's responses, I am truly grateful.

On the surface, L'Humanite is about a detective, Pharaon, dealing with his hyper sensitive nature to a rape/murder of a young girl he is investigating, but especially for his unrequited love to his neighbor, Domino. Pharoan is like a wounded, or fearful child, dumpy, perpetually slumped over, soft spoken, watery eyed, whereas Domino is considerably working class, modern, damaged, but not nearly as fearful, at least, not as openly sensitive; unlike Pharaon, she doesn't wear her fear like bad suit. But, that is just the surface of the characters and story, the actual definition of these key elements is left up to the viewer. The plot and the characters are fragments. Instead of miring itself in details, long monologues, heavy dialogue in general, or normal cinematic conventions, the film is purposefully left incomplete in many areas. Thus, the viewer is left to speculate how these gaps should be filled, left to ponder the scraps given to them.

For example, we are told Pharaon's girlfriend and child left him, but not why. Is Pharaon's sensitivity a product of his being abandoned by this woman, or was his sensitivity the cause of her leaving? Domino is clearly upset when Pharaon mentions the case of the rape/murder of the young girl, but is her reaction just empathy, or something deeper? For every detail we are given, there are often unresolved questions that are never conveniently answered.

It somewhat reminds me of a Shohei Imamrua film, like Vengeance is Mine or The Eel, in that the story unfolds through rather mundane scenes, but these scenes end up speaking volumes over the course of the film. You could also say it is a bit like Antonioni as well, as the ordinary, often bright, landscape often contributes just as much emotion as the characters. Basically, Brumo Dumont, like Imamura or Antonioni, eschews normal narrative conventions to tell a story. He lets the viewer fill in the gaps, and much of the film will always remain an engaging mystery.

This French oddity from second-time director Bruno Dumont is a masterpiece. Four minutes into the film I was ready to switch it off, but once I'd settled into the rhythm of the film I was transfixed. That took about 20 minutes, and once I'd finished the film I re-watched those first 20 minutes again.

A policeman investigates the brutal murder of a young girl in a French town and that's pretty much it. It's even less than that in some respects. For example the girl is found in the opening minutes, but it's 50 minutes before any real investigation begins. Instead it focuses on the policeman (Pharaon) and his two friends (lovers Domino and Joseph). They go to the beach, to a restaurant, stand outside their houses having stunted conversations and generally wasting the day away. Pharaon goes for a bicycle ride and tends to his allotment. Essentially nothing happens. There are maybe four or five actual plot points altogether, and the rest is filled with chat of the "Hi, how are you?" variety, long shots of people walking or driving, or opening doors. The entire film follows a kind of rhythmic cycle that becomes hypnotic if you allow it.

Which brings us to the actors. The DVD notes say they're all non-professionals. Not amateur actors, but real people who are acting for the first time. The actor who plays Joseph does reasonably well, but Domino is excellent (and it's an extremely brave performance for any actress).

Emmanuel Schotte (as Pharaon) is amazing. It's simply one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. Imagine Travis Bickle with 99pc of the anger taken out. Then cross him with Forrest Gump (with non of Hanks' caricature or comedy). Cast a non-actor who looks like a cross between Clive Owen and Alfred Molina and you're somewhere close. He's a very unlikely cop. He's wide-eyed, innocent, and simple. He's slow and deliberate. Brief comments from other characters tell us his wife and child died two years ago, and he looks like a man still stunned, as if he'd just heard the news. This is never hinted at once; we don't ever see what he was like before, no one ever tells him "You've changed", but the audience gets the feeling this is a man suffering desperately from the pain of grief. Most of this is expressed in Schotte's eyes which are desperately sad.

This low-key little film requires patience. Without Schotte's performance I don't think there'd be much of a film here. Be prepared for an extremely slow film, but one that's never boring. It will polarise opinion like few other films I've seen so I can't recommend it to everyone (and there are some very graphic sex scenes), but I thought it was amazing.