La vie de Jésus

This movie was one of my first contacts with french cinema. Later I saw a bunch more, but this one stays one of the best. It gives a somewhat scary insight in the rural parts of France. It shows a group of young boys that have definitely suffered from heavy inbreed. They are miserable machos wih an attitude. It shows a young generation with few hopes but the cheap thrills and the fast kicks. The tone of the story could be compared with 'Gummo'. The style of the movie is obviously not comparable with Gummo, since nothing is comparable in style with Gummo. But, returning to la vie de jesus, It is a beautiful movie wich leaves you with a strangely uncomfortable feeling. If you have the chance, go see it. The only thing that I really can't place it the very explicit shot somewhere in the middle of the movie.

This is an interesting French movie about young people, boredom, love, jealousy, and racism. From time to time the film moves from reality close to absurdity, and it leaves mostly the story behind - unfortunately.

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.

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.

There is enormous promise in the opening scenes of Bruno Dumont's first feature "La Vie de Jesus". He is clearly a director with a great feeling for landscape, that ability to draw the viewer into a self-contained world, in this case an agricultural area of Northern France. Within minutes we know what it is like to live in this small redbrick town bounded by seemingly endless lanes and fields where very little happens and even the local cafe is all but deserted on a weekday mid-afternoon. We share the stifling boredom of the group of unemployed youths with little do except joyride their mopeds. We are in a world akin to that of Bresson's "Au Hazard Balthazar" and "Mouchettte" with Dumont revealing his with the assured unflinching vision of the master himself. Already we are beginning to sense the thrill that comes with the intuition that we may be discovering a major new talent. A brilliantly observed scene where the group of friends visit the brother of one of them who is in a coma dying of AIDS seems to confirm this. Words cannot convey their feeling but expressions say everything. However after this doubts gradually creep in. It requires real genius to sustain viewer interest in a film about provincial ennui. Not that nothing happens. There is an attack on an Arab youth that results in manslaughter, an arrest and an escape. The problem is not a lack of psychological development. There is an inevitability about the main protagonist, Freddy's obsession with the only girl around and his gunning for the Arab as a result of sexual rivalry fuelled by group racism. Rather is the problem one of a lack of narrative development. One sequence of moped riding becomes just like any other as do all those scenes of young people just moping around. Unfortunately the film eventually evokes viewer tedium in a way that is self defeating. Nevertheless there is excitement in the discovery of a new directorial talent and the prediction that he could in time make a really outstanding film.