La vie de Jésus

Excellent, slow-paced, but rewarding film about a dead-end 20-year old and his extremely boring life in a small French town. Freddy is a young layabout who hangs around with his friends, rides his motorbike, and has rough sex with his girlfriend Marie.

This is probably the most interesting film I've ever seen about boredom. It has much in common with some of the films of Bresson, presenting an environment of extreme emptiness, all the while finding its own rhythm and feel.

Action-wise, this is up there with "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" (in other words, VERY little happens) and the director takes a few stabs at showing things in a non-judgmental/anthropological light (a la Shohei Immamura) with hardcore, clinical sex scenes and the gang's sometimes amoral attitudes, but in the end that isn't the direction the film heads in (thankfully).

This is an original and unusual vision in service of a story told with great strength and care. Dumont clearly knows what he is doing and he isn't copying anybody else.

The film shows the youngster's world as something of a void, but one not totally devoid of beauty. There are several transcendentally gorgeous moments of pure poetry in this film that really need to be experienced. Just look at the scene where young Kadder is hugged by Marie and he looks up at the sky. What a beautiful moment!! Definitely worth seeing, highly recommended. Although if you're an ADD-afflicted sort who can only stomach films that move like bullet trains, go look at something else.

La Vie de Jesus, a film by Bruno Dumont, is an unconventional look at marginal young people living in Bailleul in northern France. They spend their time without much purpose, riding around the drab Flanders town on motorbikes or playing in a marching band. From the opening of the film, I could sense that I was in the hands of a director with unique talent. One of Dumont's greatest strengths is his uncanny ability to capture the sense of emptiness of the town and the people who inhabit it. With little dialogue and no musical score other than the sounds of nature to break the stillness, we are forced to relate to the characters by observing their eyes, their physical movements, and the facial expressions that reveal an inner sadness.

In La Vie de Jesus, unemployed, uneducated, and epileptic 20-year old Freddy (David Douche) lives with his mother Yvette (Genevieve Cottreel), a café owner. Douche gives a haunting performance as the sensitive but not very bright Freddy, his body scarred from repeated falls from his motorcycle and his face mirroring the fear of not knowing when his next epileptic seizure will come. Freddy has a girl friend, Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), who works as a cashier at the supermarket but their relationship lacks an emotional pull and their graphically depicted sex feels mechanical. Dumont does not judge his characters and they are fully three-dimensional, both guilty and innocent, displaying tenderness one minute and cruelty the next, searching for human connection. Freddy trains his finch to sing and takes the boy who just lost his brother to the beach to cheer him up, yet shortly afterwards he and his friends humiliate an overweight girl who plays in the band.

One of the most moving scenes takes place at a hospital where the friends stand around a hospital bed watching one of the boys' brother who is dying of Aids. On the wall there is a picture of Jesus described as "about a guy who comes back to life". They do not talk but wait and watch silently and we wait with them as if expecting momentary redemption. Freddy and his friends are not "bad" people but each one is tightly wound, looking for a reason to explode and the film seethes with tension. When a young Arab boy Kader (Kader Chaatouf) foolishly tempts fate by making a play for Marie, the underlying racism of the society transforms an ordinary love story into a tragedy of transcendent power.

Each scene of this film grabs you. You want to *see* what is happening. As in Dumont's other film "L'Humanite", he has an intuitive grasp of what the viewer wants to see, where the human eye would naturally want to look. He is also a sensitive observer who understands human behavior in all its richness. Even though the main characters of his films are lowlives who we would probably not have much in common with, we appreciate them as human beings. He never makes fun of or degrades his characters. I disagree with the reviewer who said there is no development. I think there is a tremendous amount of development, but unlike a Hollywood film, he does not announce it with a surging musical score, a change in lighting, and other such cheap tricks. Instead, we observe a character moving beyond the grief of his brother's death when he bites off the knot of a mourning cloth he tied to his wrist. This is a great film by a great director.

Around 1960 Truffaut Chabrol and theur friends stunned the world by simply filming the World around them without any message or morality . But they mostly filmed High and Middle French Bourgeoisis . This one is set far from the Cote d'Azur..But it is not a Ken Loach Movie..In British Working Class Films People Cry,Fight,Shout and Laugh...Here They Speak a Little but they dont say anything just because they have nothing to say..And when They Talk You hardly understand one word out of three..(atleast foreign audiences will enjoy the subtitles !)..This Movie is Rude and Harsh and send back to Noddyland all other so-called "no Future" Movies . Still there's a strange beauty if the filming of those northern areas close to Ruysdael and Dutch paintings.."La vie de Jesus" belongs to this kind of film you hate at first and that you keep looking and looking to understand why . An absolute Must for all Indies lovers .

Bruno Dumonts "La Vie de Jésus" is one of the best movies I saw that year. It's a very gripping tale of a group of bored, at first glance no-good youngsters, who end up in a lot of trouble because of their racism. To me, without being a patriot, this isn't really a French, but a Belgian movie. The setting (French Flanders), but also the themes it deals with, the environment (no foreigner can fully grasp the horror of all those old people sitting on their chairs in the doorstep, waiting for something to happen, staring at the occasional passer-by). But whatever country it is made in, it is a strong story, filmed in a raw way, which very much fits the rawness of the characters in the movie. If you take under notice that all the actors were amateurs, yet they manage to make lots of so-called pros look like the real amateurs, you have to give the director credit for that.