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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.

What's this about quiet small towns that so capture the curiosity and imagination of film-makers. Here we have another study by the director of the Life of Jesus (which incidentally is about a small town too)which shows, from the surface, how a Police Superintendant copes with the brutal rape and murder of a young girl. With this as a background, the film proceeds to show the aimlessness in the protanganist's life and his relationships with the people around him.

While the pace of the film is slow, you do get a feeling that such an approach is necessary. As such, you get many long shots. You also get shots that are very upfront and will no doubt make many in the audience feel uneasy.

There will be many different comments about the show. I heard some French guys coming out of the cinema and lauding it as "Pure Cinema" while others have complained that it was pretentious. For me, I thought it was boring.

An enjoyable slice of French cinema. Unlike Hollywood movies - which usually force the audience into overdrive - this forces the audience to slow down and look at some of life's tiniest and most mundane features in great detail. The acting is superlative, as is the realism throughout. Goodness knows what the censors will make of it outside of France (I saw it uncut at the Edinburgh Film Festival). The basic story is a police hunt in a small town in France. But there's no gloss - both the police detectives and the other characters are full of human frailty down to the last wart and boil. they are all quite ordinary characters till you dig beneath the surface - and when you do dig their quirks seem somehow believable and natural.

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.

L'Humanité is undoubtedly the best French movie I've seen this year. It's somewhere between Robert Bresson and David Lynch, which is quite uncommon. This is a suspense movie, but the nature of the suspense is metaphysical. The spectator, like the hero (Pharaon de Winter), keeps on following false leads as he tries to discover WHO the murderer could be. He even suspects Pharaon himself to be guilty (which, in a way, is true, if we admit we're all guilty). The characters all seem to be on the thin border line between humanity and animality. Pharaon needs a physical contact with human beings and animal alike; most of the time, men and women are filmed as if they were beasts and vice versa. But the film bears no contempt for anyone. It's not realistic but, on the other hand, it has nothing in common with 99% of the fictions we go and see usually. There is something about empathy in L'Humanité that I had never felt in cinema before. If I had to connect it with a genre, it would definitely be an "ethological genre movie"… The screenplay is brilliant, the actors are so far away from what we expect from actors that they seem to come from another planet until we understand it's actually ours. Here is the riddle of L'Humanité: we live down here among strangers, and the nearer other people seem to be, the farther they actually are. L'Humanité is not made to entertain. If you're not looking for something else in films, don't waste your time, it has nothing in common with The End of Days.

I suspect that I understand very little about this film.

What I like about it is that it reminds me of the films of Robert Bresson and it presents itself as a protracted question, rather than a glib answer, to the question of what it means to be human.

The film explores murder and art as two products of humanity--almost to replace the usual antipodes of moral good and evil. Most of humanity falls in between--neither murderers nor artists--but still it is against these opposites that we (many of us, anyway) have to measure ourselves.

The film makers draw heavily on religious and sexual imagery--perhaps to stand in for spiritual and animal natures. But these images are teasing, and they do not add up to an overarching theme or statement--they merely reiterate the nagging puzzle of human nature and existence.

The film sets itself up--with its languorous takes, odd yet lifelike characters, and shocking imagery--to be reviled, and honestly it's hard to say whether the film really is just pretentious. Maybe it is if you see it that way.

The film is not easy. It is long. It seems long. And much more than most film, it remains in your thoughts and feelings (if you happen to be a thinking, feeling person) for a long time.

Alone among the films I have seen this year, it is the one film that, although while watching it I impatiently wished it would "get on with it," I have subsequently bothered to meditate on and find out what else I could about it.

L'Humanite was a very slow paced movie. Some of the scenes in

the movie were so slow and need to be cut out. The movie was

2hrs and 20min and should of been 1hr and 45 min. L'Humanite

story was very bitter and the sex scenes were not really needed,

but I wasn't complaining. I thought the movie should of gone

more towards the young 11 year old death then putting the main

story about the police lieutenant that found the body. I really didn't

care about the women Domino and the crush the police lieutenant

had. I thought L'Humanite was too slow and only thing that kept

me watching was the soft core sex . Cannes should of picked a

better film for it's Grand Jury Prize and not this really boring movie.

Also Whats the deal with a police lieutenant still living with his

mom.

** out of ****

I can't quite imagine what the Cannes jury saw in this film - unless it was some cruel joke they came up with to torture film goers - if it was it worked..

I should've left - I deeply regret that I did not, but I thought (wrongly it turns out) that SOMETHING might happen to explain why this film would be well thought of.. In fact it just became more and more frustrating - especially at the end with the levitating, the kiss and Phaeron's handcuffs - why why why?!

The film went back and forth between utter torturous boredom (don't get me wrong - I don't mind a slowly developing story but there wasn't even that!) and shocking close ups of monotonous sex scenes.. And it certainly wasn't erotic - if anything quite the opposite..

All I can really say is if you value your time at all avoid this film - it will most likely waste your time and energy and you will end up as aggravated as I did.

There are good films and there are bad films. Sometimes it looks as if good and bad are only measured subjectively. Since film is art, and since there are no "laws of art", but aesthetic tastes involved, one is tempted to agree. However, this is not quite true. There are films that managed to hurt the feeling of viewers not because of their lack of quality, but because of their inconvenience. They force the viewer to see things differently, to think a bit more, to say good-bye to the usual, traditional, uninspiring, superficial entertainment they are used to. Sometimes, people will learn from these challenges what films can also be – they are taught to appreciate films in a different manner, and they are thankful for the experience. But some viewers dislike being challenged. They want to see the breaking-up of traditional; they don't want to be intellectually involved. They have certain expectations, and they like being disappointed. Which is why they are angry at these particular films. For them, abandoning the usual patterns is like being forced out of their homes. Thus they strike back: They call the film rubbish, boring, stupid. It's less likely that they will say: It's too different to be liked; I don't want differences. Rather, they conclude that their personal taste – which is, after all, also the taste of the "majority" – is the "right" taste to have. Films that don't fit can't be so good. No doubt bad films exist. "L'Humanité" is not one of them. It's a challenge, but it will only work if what you ask of cinema is more than just being entertained for the moment. If you want a fast and furious dinner of the usual, don't bother to watch. This is a philosophical way of movie-making, designed only for very few people. Like all great films, it will find it's audience and remain. Unlike the bulk of average films, it inevitably also finds it's enemies. However, this is nothing to worry about. Depending on who dislikes it, it is rather a sign of quality.

I saw this film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and would not recommend it. It is two and a half hours long, during which nothing much happens at a wading-through-porridge pace.

The main characters are gormless and totally lacking in charisma or personality. No-one smiles at all during the film (neither would I if I had their lives), and although Domino seems to have a healthy sexual appetite she doesn't seem to enjoy sex at all.

The whole experience is depressing and ponderous, the director lingering over each scene in a way that drove me crazy rather than striking me with the beauty of his technique.

Too many questions were left in my mind: why does he sniff the Algerian man's head? Why does he levitate? What is he looking at over the allotment fence? Why does he kiss Joseph? Why did we go and see this rubbish rather than ordering another bottle of wine in Bouzy Rouge?

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.

"Humanite" appears to be a film about a child murder/rape and the search for the killer. In fact, the film is a character study en masse which tediously examines a handful of players with Schotte at the center as a rural cop. A critic's darling because it is oh so different, "Humanite" could be said to be avant guarde neo-hyper-realism. Or, it could be said to be a load of crap. The film does not equal the sum of its parts and is frustratingly incongruous for no apparent reason. I personally found it strangely fascinating. However, I suspect the film going public at large will reject "Humanite" as tedious and too over-the-top. Good stuff for cinema sophisticates into French film but certainly not for everyone. (B)

In France, in the small-town of Bailleul , the weird, melancholy, lonely and widow police superintendent Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is investigating the brutal murder of an eleven years old girl, who was raped while returning from school. Pharaon lives with his mother, and spends most of his leisure time with his neighbor Domino (Séverine Caneele) and her fiancé Joseph (Phileppe Tullier). Pharaon feels a kind of platonic love with Domino. The police department staff is being pressed by Lille and Paris to solve the crime and a strike of the workers of a factory. This French low budget movie is developed in a too slow pace and has very human characters. I liked it a lot, but I recognize that audiences only used to watch American movies will not like 'L' Humanité'. In Hollywood, this 142 minutes running time film would be an American 30 minutes short story. But lovers of cinema as art will certainly appreciate this simple but well directed story. The trauma with the character of Pharaon, being consumed by his grieving for the death of wife and daughter, by his repressed love for Domino, by the scene of the brutal death of the child and by the pressure of the command of the police, is amazingly performed by Emmanuel Schotté. I did not understand the kiss of Pharaon in the lips of Joseph in the end of the story. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): 'A Humanidade' ('The Humanity')

European films may be slower-paced and less plot driven than American films, but this takes it way too far. It also show a whole bunch of incompletely drawn characters doing inexplicable things. It's not fantasy, it's not even surreal, it's just awkward and bad.

What's the message here? That people in France are pensive and gaze morosely a lot? That they like to watch other people having sex? They they spontaneously scream or touch a stranger on his neck? Do not wear a watch when seeing this film, as you will be astonished at how little is explained or learned over huge stretches of time.

This is the story of a "police superintendent" who is deeply troubled by the brutal murder of a little girl, though actually he seems troubled before then. He is not merely upset at his own personal tragedies, but apparently mentally quite slow, behaving very much like a learning-disabled six-year old child. He stares blankly a lot, walks with arms rigid like a little kid, speaks in meek, simpering, tones, behaves quite oddly in all of his interactions (though no one seems to notice or care, even when it is supposed to be police business). He's not a troubled cop, more of an outpatient. Picture Andy Kaufman's Latka character on Taxi, but without the humor. He is not only not believable as a policeman he is not believable as an adult. That he won an award for this interpretation of his character is truly amazing -- unless he was playing the part exactly as written and the fault lies with the weirdos who scripted this thing. The plot is clearly secondary. Do not expect to see anything remotely like what police would do if a little girl was found murdered. This not that important, though the implausibility of their behavior is sort of insulting. The problem is that the rest of the film makes no sense either. That leaves the long lingering close-ups of fields, vegetable gardens, people's faces etc. The ending struck me as especially ridiculous -- totally unsupported by the events leading up to it -- unless you think, "What's the worst way this film could end?"

There is lots of sex and nudity, which is supposed to mean something. You want vaginas? You'll see vaginas. Not to worry, it's art. It has deep meaning, what I am not sure. And the protagonist, despite his innocent weirdness, seems to have some sort of homoerotic neck or jowl fetish.

Finally, the subtitles are in white and frequently appear on a white background -- very hard to read many of them. On the other hand, there isn't much dialogue, so this isn't a big problem. There is also very little sound -- not even ambient sounds you would expect to hear -- in the film, contributing to the emptiness of the whole experience. The old Woody Allen would have had a field day parodying this work.

That this is an award-winning film is sad. I would hate to see the losing films.

Enjoy.

This two and a half hour long film was shown recently at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) at a 10 PM show. There was a scheduled 1 AM show after that, but wondered if anyone was going to stay awake to see that until 3:30 am. The opening scene is of a man walking in a field, and it lasts four minutes of movie time. It is an ominous sign of what's to come: a good 144 minutes more of pretty much the same. There is a scene of a man and a woman against a wall, standing in the sun. It is repeated 15 times, with very sparse dialogue. Occasionally, these very long slow sequences are interrupted by shocking stills, such as a close up of female genitalia, shown for one full minute of film time (audience crowd laughing in the last 20 seconds, as to say, "what's the message?"). The story resembles Dostoyevsky's novel "The Karamazov brothers", in which a cretin falls in love with a woman of easy morals. In one of the rare instants in which the crowd was laughing (more in desperation to try to justify having been there already a full two hours to see nothing happening) was when the statement by a british tourist that he couldn't see things clearly since the Eurostar train was traveling at 180 miles an hour, was translated by the translator with automatic switch of units of measure from English System to Metric system to "they couldn't see things clearly since the train was traveling at 300 kilometers per hour". What was amazing about this movie is that the quality of cinematography reveals that alot of money has been spent on it. This was no film kitchen 8-mm experiment. It was carefully planned, structured, acted, montaged. Yet, I got so little out of it. Some comments indictated on the excruciating detail, such as the minutae of a dandling key chain on a door just opened. Okay, it was noted, but what was the purpose? Some corageous people in the audience walked away after the first hour. The rest remained out of curiosity: there must be something happening at the end. There never was. And maybe that's what the film is about. All the movies at the theater are action-packed. This one wants to be different. There is nothing happening.

Bruno Dumont is something of a controversial filmmaker, producing singular films that draw on the influence of people like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman and early Michael Haneke in a clear attempt to create an enhanced state of realism that works both for and against the film and the audience. Also, like his contemporaries Gaspar Noé and Carlos Reygadas, it could be argued that Dumont makes films that challenge the viewer to engage with a story that will undoubtedly take us to some very dark and often shockingly immoral places; giving us characters that are morally ambiguous, often loathsome and, in the case of our central protagonist here, almost pitiful. There aren't many filmmakers who would choose as their hero of a bleak detective thriller an innocent man-child who seems to be as socially inept and emotionally damaged as a person could possibly be, and yet, with Police Chief Pharaon De Winter, that is exactly what we get.

Dumont makes his bleak, desolate vision obvious right from the start, with the horrendous discovery of a murdered and mutilated child left naked and bleeding in a stark, autumnal field. The image is both shocking and brutal; with Dumont giving us a punch to the stomach right from the very first frame with a lingering close-up of the wound and filleted body parts. It's an image that both establishes and surmises the film as a thematic whole; the loss of innocence being central both with the murder of the child and with the character of Pharaon himself. It is the idea of back-story and the fragile demeanour of Pharaon - and to an extent the evocative performance of non-professional actor Emmanuel Schotte - which anchors the film, giving the audience an emotional spectator. He is also our representation within the film, mirroring the feelings of the audience if not quite our actions. After the aforementioned discovery there are no macho heroics; Pharaon reacts on an emotional level unseen in films of this nature, running back to his car, tears streaming down his face, lost in a kind of detached melancholy that continues throughout the film.

Over the course of the film, the narrative continues to unfold at a slow and deliberate pace, though we quickly realise that the real detective story at hand is not necessarily about the murder of the child, but more importantly, what has happened to make Pharaon the way he is. Has Pharaon had some sinister part in all of this, or is he merely a constant observer. The idea of voyeurism is an important one in Dumont's work, with the camera rarely moving; always static, removed from the context of the scene and merely recording things for our benefit. This gives the film a greater degree of realism, though may be a little tiresome for viewers weaned on a more westernised approach to cinema, with one hypnotic scene in particular finding our central protagonist tending his allotment for what seems like the best part of fifteen minutes.

As the film continues to unfold, and the clues begin to add up, we realise that this isn't going to have a clear-cut, moralistic ending akin to a routine police/crime thriller. Then again, with a central character who lives at home with a controlling mother, who adores the woman who lives down the street and allows her boyfriend to belittle him at every available opportunity and often stands monosyllabic at the back of a room... how on earth could it? With L'Humanité (1999), Dumont has attempted to create a stripped down, bare-naked form of ambient cinema, in which it is the little character details and passages of silence, broken only by shocking violence and mechanical sex, that go towards creating the story.

The ending of the film continues in this same vein and acts as a sort of shocking epiphany, in which every action and subtle line of dialog that has occurred during the epic running time is suddenly given a whole new meaning. Dumont has proved with this, his second feature, that he can reach beyond the tiresome kitchen sink theatrics of his first film, La Vie de Jesus (1997) and incorporate distancing naturalistic techniques (no camera movements, no artificial light, non-professional actors, etc) to create a film that is both horrendous and intoxicating in equal measures. Though enjoy is certainly the wrong word to use with a film this bleak and confrontational, those amongst you who admire the work of forward thinking European auteurs like the aforementioned Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé and Lars von Trier will certainly admire and appreciate Dumont's shattering tour-de-force.

Most American crime/detective stories try to build suspense with effects, plot twists & music. This one relies entirely on the development of the characters & the mood of the events' settings. The result is a tale much creepier than anything Hollywood (including Cronenberg & David Lynch) could muster. This one isn't for the faint-hearted, not because of any gore or violence in the film, but rather because of its dark portrayal of human behavior.