Flandres

In a grey and uncharming part of France, these farming people live. Life is quiet. You start a relation with the girl in the neighbor house. Life would have remained quiet if it wasn't for war. Or...? There's a shocking contrast here, between the silent life and the brutal battles in Africa. It directly affects also life at home, in an almost as brutal way. Can the things we've done, those wounds, be healed? Maybe they can after all.

A very tense drama, which is sometimes hard to watch. Well acted, and very far from mainstream action, especially when it comes to psychological violence.

Bruno Dumont seems to create controversy in every one of his films, but I've only seen "Flandres" and "L'Humanite. " Dumont's film language is very bleak and very stark. He uses little to no soundtrack music, letting ambient sound to substitute. His characters seem to writhe in a painfully prosaic film world, their experiences and torments more vivid for the lack of melodrama.

Demeste (Samuel Boidin) and Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) have a complicated romantic relationship in a rural farming village somewhere in Francophone Europe. Barbe is promiscuous with other men, yet Demeste seems to permit the trysts without comment. You only see his brooding glares. All the young men in the area enlist to go off for war somewhere in an Arab desert. They young soldiers take their emotional baggage with them into this hostile environment. There are fistfights in the camp, firefights in the field, and no one understands the language or mannerisms of the locals. Inevitably, acts of war become acts of war crimes. Seemly normal guys go off to war and become brutal Neanderthals murdering, molesting and bailing. The survivors, like all survivors, are left to try and understand what happened and what they've become.

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 is back in form here with his fourth release (I found the plot of his previous "Twentynine Palms" to be flawed). Any of you who saw 'The Life of Jesus'('97) and/or 'Humanity'('99) can expect much of the same in terms of style; and to a certain extent, themes as well. This is by no means an easy film to watch (the war scenes, shot in Tunisia, are, at times, just dreadful). And even the storyline which takes place in Flandres, in the north of France (where Dumont is from, and his first two films are set), is full of emotional pain. A very French film, but not of the condescending, intellectual sort, but rather of the realistic, naturalistic, and yes, minimalistic variety. To be seen on the big screen for full effect.

I'm not sure how "Flanders" came to my attention but I am certainly glad that I had the opportunity to see it and I intend to seek out more of director Dumont's work. The film takes a cold hard look at nature of humanity, love, and war. The work of Bresson and his effective use of non-professional actors came to mind for me.

War is brutal. People are capable of doing very bad things in the name of love and war as this film so well demonstrates. I was disgusted by "Blackhawk Down" when it was released to feed the blood lust in the run up to the war in Iraq. I found Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" dishonest. The pro war message of that film was much stronger than any anti war theme it presented. If the old and wealthy had to fight wars instead of the young there would be a hell of a lot fewer wars.

Dumont's view of humanity is not very positive nor is his view of war. People are not very caring and are capable of evil. Sending people to kill others is not a glorious thing. I'm tired of being told "war is hell" and that things like the killing of women and children and the torture and killing of POWs is the cost of doing war and has always been done.

The characters in "Flanders" seem appropriately dead to their own existence and that of others. Dumont's visuals add to the sense of a brutal, inhospitable world. His is an effective and affectless view of the world as I experience it as a kind of a horror show. I recently heard a statistic that in addition to the 54,000 soldiers we lost in combat in Vietnam 200,000 veterans have committed suicide. I'm not sure how accurate that is but the stories I am hearing about the physical, psychological, and mental trauma to the troops returning from Iraq makes war seem a luxury humankind cannot afford. I am grateful that for this work by Bruno Dumont. It is not an easy film to watch but it is, I think, an important one.