Certainly my least favorite of the Death trilogy, I think that viewing the trilogy out of order diminished the potency of Gerry for me. Had I seen Gerry when it was first released in the cinema as a follow up to Finding Forrester, I think that the sparseness and ambition of it would have been more jarring. I mean, it’s unsettling enough seeing a film with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck; who knew Damon would be willing to make a film with the other Affleck? As each film in the trilogy is based on a story that Van Sant read in the newspaper (two hikers getting lost in the desert, school shootings, Cobain’s death) I think that the shuffled Bostonian pairing must be at least somewhat significant to Van Sant’s pop culture obsessions. Van Sant credits Bela Tarr in the closing credits, who seems to be one of the main influences for this new style that Van Sant pulled out of the air. Though I think that the borrowed tracking shots and tone are welcome and fitting for these films, Gerry ever reaches the realistic mysticism of Tarr’s work (which I think he does reach in Elephant and Last Days). While moments of this film are hypnotic and beautiful, the meandering becomes, not boring like so many people complain, but tired. Some reviews I’ve read suggest this ‘would make a great short’ but I think that much of the endless wandering is essential. Perhaps shortening it to, a still feature length, 55 or 60 minutes would fit it well. I normally frown on suggestions for abbreviating films where ‘nothing happens,’ but I don’t get anything about of the 55min.-85min. segment of the film that I didn’t get in the first 45 minutes.

That said, there are a lot of interesting things happening in the film. The name/term gerry is used to describe turns and detours, and is also both characters nicknames (I thought it was their God-given names, but Van Sant has said that their names are never said, and they only call each other Gerry). This is one of a few suggestions that Affleck and Damon’s characters are each half of the same character, Damon’s. One is more logical in his attempts to navigate the desert while the other is more instinctual. There isn’t much dialogue in the film, so there are only a few arguments for or against this theory. The death/murder/mercy killing at the end becomes much more interesting if it is in fact one person instead of two, while as a more straight forward narrative it is sad but predictable. The death scene is also notable as it is the most subtle example of spontaneous homoeroticism of any of the films in the trilogy; it was strange to see what I expected to be an imminent lovemaking scene turn into a murder. Finding the road at the end was unsatisfying for me, in the same way that the last scene of The Mist kills the tragedy of the film, despite it being an attempt at making the situation more devastating.

This is my first Wadja film, who I might be ashamed to say I never even heard of until the Criterion Collection announced their upcoming Danton DVD. Seeing Katyn, I was initially somewhat surprised at how standard the film was. It is very similar in tone and appearance to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It does do a few interesting things though. The film follows several different stories, all of them stemming from the Polish prisoner-of-war Andrej. The cinematography is desaturated and browned slightly for an older, gritty look that makes the periodic leaps into archival film stock of the events at Katyn Forest feel like less of a separation in time. The acting is competent throughout, but I don’t think that anything necessarily stands out exceptionally. The film is difficult to write about because it is absolutely a ‘good’ film, but it doesn’t really good anything really interesting or really wrong. It’s a well-made historical document about an event that I was unaware of, and it compellingly brought it to my attention.

As a film by a supposed ‘auteur’ I was underwhelmed because of how objective and textbook it seemed to be. The most interesting thing about the film is its inclusion of very Catholic sensibilities, most notably the film’s final line being the Lord’s Prayer by a succession of men being offed one after another, closing on a shot of a fist-clenched rosary. It was strange and refreshing to see a film set in Europe in the 1940s, about an event in which thousands of innocents were killed, and for the religious bent to be Christian. The film doesn’t feel religious, though; it is definitely about the killing and repressed standards of living in wartime.

Other interesting moments involve small stories such as the young guy who ripped down a Stalin poster and was subsequently chased by Soviet soldiers until he had to run into oncoming traffic and was killed by a car. The Soviets were not certain to kill or even detain this boy, but I still viewed the circumstance as a murder. The ultimate force, then, was their threats, and not necessarily their actions.

I’m certainly gald that I saw Katyn, but it doesn’t make me want to seek out more Wadja. The slaughter of Katyn Forest is devastating and important for everyone to know about, but this film does aim to progress the genre.

Long live the new flesh, indeed. I was fascinated with this Crash, the only Crash that should exist, but I still felt like it was a bit too much of a rearrangement and sexed-up version of the same films that Cronenberg had been making up until this point. It is more polished than anything up to this point, though, and is probably the best stand-alone film other than The Fly that I have seen by him. I often hear an opinion from people who confuse David Cronenberg with David Lynch because they are both weird, North American Davids working with a lot of violence and a lot of sex. But, I think that they have both been mislabeled for the sex in their films, which I don’t think there is even that much of at all. Lynch is on most people’s radars for the lesbian scene in Mulholland Dr.; the only time I’ve seen that film on the big screen was at the Coolidge Corner Theatre as part of their ‘Films that turn us on’ series. And I think that Cronenberg has similarly been branded for excessive sexuality in his films because of Crash, though his other films only have brief moments. Crash also has a lot in common with Wild at Heart, especially in these films’ presentations of sex.

Also similar to Lynch, and even more than him, Cronenberg’s characters have a stilted, 90s way of delivering their lines that was initially offputting for me been I first saw History of Violence. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad acting, but I think that these films very much come from and are influenced by common made-for-television movies-of-the-week and soft porn styles and conventions, and they seek to descontruct and demolish what those films stand for. While Lynch dissects and obliterates American ideals and fantasies, Cronenberg uses Crash to expose naive perceptions created by ‘movie sex’. The first few sex scenes, the first one at the plane, Spader’s early sex scenes, especially the ones in cars, all play like Red Shoe Diaries episodes. Tacky dramatic lighting, slow-mo thrusting, breezy music. The movie slowly but surely evolves away from that into a disturbing sado-masochistic fetish for car crashes. Characters reveal bizarre intentions and turn-ons that seems all the more crazy because of how the film was set up. The film asks the viewer to be open-minded toward such fetishes and non-vanilla sex, but it is difficulty to see the appeal of dismemberment, scars, and disability. The film successfully stretched my liberalism toward sex until it couldn’t be stretched anymore.

The characters in this film, like so many of Cronenberg’s films, can only be truly happy when they can remove themselves from their humanity, always working and building toward a more digital or mechanical way of being. Thus, it is consistent and important to Cronenberg body of work. However, I think that with this film he started showing signs of exhausting the idea, and he has since, thankfully, been moving into different but relative territory.

Though I still haven’t seen Gerry, I think it is safe to say that this is going to be my favorite film in Van Sant’s Death trilogy, and is also my favorite of any of his films. There are a few things that I rely on appreciating when I go into a 21st century Van Sant film: long tracking shots, minimalism, and out-of-nowhere homoeroticism. All of these get big check marks in Last Days. The film got a lot of hoopla for being related to/about/referencing Kurt Cobain and his death. I don’t care or know anything about Nirvana of Cobain’s life; I don’t think I can name three of their songs. So I went into this trying to ignore that aspect of it, despite having to acknowledge its Warhol-esque pop culture cynicism. Formally, the film seems perfectly designed to put off Cobain enthusiasts who rushed into the film for a biopic on their fallen hero, which is the most likely reason this film has such an outspoken and inapporpriately negative reputation. The film really isn’t changed at all by Cobain’s name or legacy; this is a film about a distraught musician on his last leg. Fame doesn’t come into play at all, though I’m sure many people who see that as being a factor in Cobain’s suicide force that into their readings of the film; the film doesn’t attempt to answer any questions about why the protagonist is so depressed, because it has better things on its mind.

Despite standing on its own in a fictional universe, the film, like Elephant, gains a great deal of tension by the audience knowing that scenes of death are coming. Unlike in Elephant, Last Days leaves those expectations unsatisfied. The climax isn’t an intense killing spree or moment of reflection. When Blake (Michael Pitt) is found dead at the end, I was surprised at how unmomentous it is. It felt to me as if about five minutes of the film were missing that lead to the death. I wasn’t even sure that the body was Blake’s until his ghost crawls out of him and climbs up the windows panes, presumably into heaven. This scene is beautiful and strangely avant garde, flattening the space of the environment to allow for Blake’s ghost to grab areas of the frame that are out of reach in reality. Its a brilliant way to show the new reality that death would bring if there were an afterlife; time and space cease to exist in any comprehensible form. Thus, this gives the film a significant sense of spirituality that is either absent or only hinted at in the more realist Elephant. Not that Elephant is missing spirituality, it doesn’t call for anything of the sort. But it is a huge reason why I prefer Last Days. It’s a satisfying and baffling payoff to the meandering meditation that makes up the rest of the film, and is the most optimistic of any of Van Sant’s finales that I’ve seen.

Martel’s debut only got better with my second viewing of it. It is one of the most brilliantly disorienting films that I have ever seen, with every scene having something uncomfortable on display. But it is done subtly, and I only really notice the effect that the film had on me once it ends. But my reaction is immediate. It’s like I’ve been put under a spell, and when the credits fade in I snap out of it and everything that the film has done to me instantly takes its toll. Having now seen The Headless Woman (though only once) I still much prefer this one, but it is nice to know that she is still working toward similar goals: controlling and frustrating the audience at will, presenting circumstances that are almost mundane but are just off enough to hesitate and disrupt the film’s flow into and out off my consciousness, dazing me just as her characters are dazed.

I’ve developed a strange infatuation with the idea of Lucrecia Martel over the last three months. Before La Cienaga, I had not seen any of Martel’s three features. I had a vague interest in seeing her new film, The Headless Woman, when I was at the Cannes film festival last May, but a swift word-of-mouth of how awful it was turned me off and I decided to skip it. Fast forward a few months, and I get an issue of Film Comment that shows near unanimous praise for the film among the magazine’s 8-10 critics, many awarding it a 5 out of 5 stars. Then I read that Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who was on the jury at Cannes, considered it the best film in the Competition. Add to all of this the unfulfilled expectation of its inclusion in the Toronto Film Festival, and the missed opportunities and hidden proclamations of masterpiece status were enough for the film to explode in my head as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, the best kind.

So I went out and bought Martel’s first two features, and put off watching either of them for one reason or another, and now I’ve finally gotten a chance to watch this one, her first film. If The Headless Woman is anything near the quality of La Cienaga, then Martel will be one of my favorite living filmmakers, because this film is spectacular. It somehow manages to tell an epic story about a woman who drunkenly falls and cuts up her chest on broken glass, and the family and friends who swarm around her as she recovers. Her life is never in danger, so in that way it is different than recent Desplechin films, but it has a similar vibe to his Kings and Queen and Un Conte de Noel.

There are all kinds of sexual tensions running through this film, and children carelessly shooting guns in a forest, always just about to shoot each others’ heads off, and a religious phenomenon that has the media in a frenzy. My head was spinning the entire time. Sometimes I had no idea what was going on, and I’m still unsure of many of the characters’ relations to one another. But the cumulative effect of the film is dazzling, hypnotic, paranoid, and somehow perfect.

I didn’t know that Kelly Reichardt had made a film previous to this one until a few minutes ago, so I’m having to tamper a lot of my gushing over it for being such a strong debut as I’m writing this. Reichardt certainly seems to be a director ‘of the times;’ she shows very strong sentiments toward the environment (city versus ‘the outdoors’) and economy in her films, especially showing the tension between the lower and middle classes. In Old Joy, Mark is representative of a ‘comfortable enough’ mindset, as he and his wife are about to have a child, seemingly because that’s what people do, even though they do not seem to have the time or funds to appropriately raise a kid. Kurt, clearly of a lower class (I’m still not sure whether he is homeless or not), sees through the veils of society in a very hippy/hipster way, fittingly ‘one’ with nature. He lures Mark away from the domain where he aims to address and identify what exactly it is that has come between the two of them as friends. The film’s themes of growing apart and the awkwardness of visiting the past are universally presented and are successfully applicable to any viewer’s sense of change, but I think Reichardt’s central examination is of the tensions that exist between classes, and she uses two best friends as the the vehicle for her exploration of this idea. Mark and Kurt have probably been friends since high school, if not before that, and were presumably of the same social class at one point. But Mark’s conservative tendencies and Kurt’s hipsterism drove their lifestyles apart, and thus it now seems impossible for the two to continue any sort of genuine friendship. Kurt does break his silence at the campfire on the first night of their trip, but he quickly retracts his concern and hides it away again; the film is so effective because of the constant tension between Mark and Kurt that remains stubbornly hidden. Thus, everything between them feels false or artificial in some way, and I felt like when Kurt gets out of Mark’s car at the end of their trip and then waves goodbye with a hammy smile that they would probably never hang out with each other again.

The sauna scene at the end of their trip is so relaxing to watch. The sounds and greens combine for a kind of ‘Pure Moods’ effect. Then Kurt gives Mark a massage and I just about fell asleep it was so calming. I’m prone to falling asleep during massage scenes in films, so I saw it coming and sat up and rubbed my eyes to keep myself from succumbing to the looming unconsciousness. This film has a very special and simple idea and presentation, and I’m glad that Wendy and Lucy proved that it wasn’t a fluke. Reichardt is one of my favorite American filmmakers right now, and I am looking forward to her upcoming period piece (?).

My faith in Wong Kar Wai is being restored as I catch up with his earlier films that I never got around to watching. I loved Happy Together, and now I very much liked Chungking Express. My problem with his more recent films is that it seems like he’s too consciously creating these romanticized scenarios and throwing out substance from the films. I’d written him off after seeing his overpraised 21st century work because I thought they were nothing but style, and a style that I didn’t even like very much. I also didn’t like his use of music; he reminded me of Tarantino, gone soft. Though Chungking Express might have tired out ‘California Dreamin” for me for the next couple of years, his use of pop music in this and Happy Together feels more inspired and creative, and also less awkwardly and self-conscously ‘in’ (Cat Power and Norah Jones?), than his newer work. While my memory of In the Mood For Love is hazy, the two things that stick out in my mind are slow motion glances and that theme song that must have played twenty times in the film. My disappointment in that film still hasn’t completely worn off.

But other than the music, Chungking is more formally interesting than anything else I’ve seen by Wong so far. Not knowing anything about the film going into it, I was surprised by the abrupt shift into an apparently separate film altogether, dividing the film into two lovesick cop stories. The noirishness of the former half cuts into a more sunshiny telling of longing, brought in by Faye’s naive airiness and the nearly incessantly playing Mamas and the Papas track. Tony Leung’s Cop 663 is less dopey than Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Cop 223 from the first half of the film, but is still able to have a sense of humor about his romantic misfortunes. When he talks to all of the inanimate objects in his apartment as if they are having the same emotional reactions and feelings that he is experiencing, it’s funny and sweet without making him seem pathetic. Cop 223 is funny but also kind of obnoxious; it makes sense that he has trouble finding a girl that will stay with him.

I had the feeling that I was missing a few things while watching this that will make me like the film even more the next time I see it if I can pick up on them. I thought that the wrap-up at the end was either, or a combination of, rushed, muddled, or contrived. It felt weak considering how well placed everything before it had been. But still, there is a coldness that I get from all of Wong’s films, even the ones I like, that I think will prevent him from ever being one of my favorite filmmakers, but I’m still more than happy to occasionally dive into one of his films.

Again another masterpiece. The last two films I’ve seen by Mr. Kiarostami, I’ve pushed the play button with a slight anxiety that I will finally be treated to a film by him that is only just ‘good.’ But my fears were alleviated with brevity as it only took a few minutes for me to become completely engrossed in everything about this film. The idea behind the story in this film is quite similar to the recent Colour Me Kubrick. I’m almost convinced that that film is at least an homage and borderline plagiarizing the event that is depicted in this one (There are probably interviews with the filmmakers of Kubrick in which they cite Close-Up‘s influence, but I’m too lazy to look). In both Kubrick and Close-Up, the protagonists pretend that they are well-known filmmakers; John Malkovich portrays Alan Conway who pretends that he is the reclusive Stanley Kubrick, and Hossein Sabzian (portraying Hossein Sabzian) pretends that he is Mohsen Makhmalbaf, director of The Cyclist. Where Kubrick was a fictional account of a true story that emptily narrowed down Conway’s motivations to narcissism, boredom, and laziness, Kiarostami’s film is a subtle and complex study of the nature of fiction.

Sabzian’s brief life as Makhmalbaf is a true story; in fact, every single person seen in Close-Up other than Kiarostami is playing themselves and acting out the actual events as they happened. If they are leaving information out of the reenactment, they fooled me, because this is an incredibly detailed account of the days that Sabzian fooled and housed with the Ahankhah family. The film is intercut with actual footage that Kiarostami shot during the trial in with the Ahankhah family attempted to prosecute Sabzian. The film, like all of the Kiarostami’s that I’ve have seen so far save for Where is the Friend’s House?, takes a while to grasp in terms of what is fiction and what is non-fiction, and just how many layers of reality are being depicted. I think that one could argue that the entire film is fiction with someone who thinks that everything in the film is non-fiction, and both would probably be just as right and wrong as the other.

I love to imagine the production of this film, and how awkward it must have been for the Ahankhah family to film scenes with Sabzian after feeling so betrayed by him. An exaggerated example of this is if a filmmaker wanted to make a fictional film of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and cast Bill Clinton as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton as Hillary Clinton, and Lewinsky as Lewinsky. The audacity of the idea is so good that it feels too good to be true, yet it is. The film ends with a typically moving moment of redemption and forgiveness. I haven’t seen a short or feature length film by Kiarostami yet that hasn’t ended with me somewhere between emotionally flustered and tears welling up, and none of these reactions are from sadness, but simply from blissful happiness.

Gus Van Sant is one of the most night and day filmmakers that I am familiar with, creating feature films and shorts that I can’t find a middle ground on, I either love them or hate them. It’s a great relationship to have with a filmmaker, because I know when I see something by him, I know that I will come out of the experience with a passionate reaction to what I’ve seen. After his mainstream Good Will Hunting, Psycho, Finding Forrester trifecta, I thought I was done with him. Especially since I didn’t share the praise for My Own Private Idaho that so many others have, I didn’t see any reason to continue paying attention to him. And then his Death trilogy happened followed by Paranoid Park and he made this impossible turn-around that was so out of the blue. He went from movie-of-the-week Oscar seeker to some kind of godson of Bela Tarr. I’m suspicious of the abrupt transformation, but I’m certainly glad that it happened. So when Milk was announced I was ecstatic to see how he would apply his new cinematic techniques to this kind of a film. The trailer was eventually released and reviews began coming in and all signs were pointing to a return to his 20th century form. I lost interest in the project and pushed if off of my radar, as I’d lost hope that it would have anything worthwhile for me. There are two genres in film that I have trouble forcing myself to be interested in (beside traditional Hollywood junk): political thrillers and biopics. There is something silly about a Hollywood celeb dressing up as a well-known figure and acting out his Wiki page or recreating something that should be a documentary instead of fictional non-fiction. There are filmmakers who play with fiction and non-fiction in formally interesting ways, but biopics and political recreations are just a kind of candied version of the truth for people who are too ADD for the real thing.

So anyway, I was hesitant to see this film when it was released, and I certainly wanted to see it far enough after Proposition 8 so that my feelings toward the film wouldn’t be swayed too much by that. I think it’s important to forget concurrent real life events that relate to a film when watching it, like talking about Wendy and Lucy and the economic crisis as if the film is a response to these ‘tough times.’ Neither of these films was made with these issues in mind, so I think it’s unfortunate that I have to watch them in circumstances that cause me to think about things that the filmmakers weren’t intending for me to think about. Prop. 8 does help me contextualize the battle against Prop. 6 recreated in Milk, but like I said, I wish I didn’t have a contextualization other than the film itself.

I thought Milk was pretty great, as good as it possibly could have been given its format and subject. Sean Penn was a revelation for me, I’ve never liked him in a film before, but he characterizes Harvey Milk as such a sweet and important man I couldn’t not wish that the film would end differently than it was going to. The film managed to make me forget that it was based on history, a plus, and I was able to become absorbed in the characters personal decisions and relationships as if the outcome wasn’t already determined. When Harvey and Scott split, it’s pretty tough to take, and the lover that Harvey has after him feels inferior simply because he isn’t Scott. I could praise every actor individually, but it’s been done already all over the internet, so I’ll just say that everyone in this is the best that I’ve ever seen them.

I don’t think it was good when, at the end of the film, they show photos of the main characters in the film, first the actor dressed in character, and then a photo of the actual person. All of the real life photos revealed just how dolled up and attractive the film made them, reminding me that the film partially exists to make money based on its stars and sex appeal. Should the gay community be interested in this because James Franco looks like a hunk and has his shirt off a lot, even if the real life Scott is not that easy on the eyes? or that all of Harvey’s staff look like the cast of That 70’s Show? I could have suspended the illusion just a little bit longer than the credits. But anyway, it’s an important film about an important man, and the main point is that as many people as possible know about him and what he did and how things aren’t so different now than they were in the 70s. The Oscar season has already tossed out any illusion that they intend to honor the bests films of any year, and have instead latched onto an idea that their decisions will be political statements. The idea that Slumdog Millionaire is the Best Picture winner, therefore I guess considered more important than Milk, is embarrassing and idiotic.

La Vie de Jésus (1997)

The title of Dumont’s debut suggests an examination of spirituality that I didn’t get from the film, suggesting either irony, pretension, or that I am immune to spirituality in films (could be the case, ie. my lack of appreciation for Davies and Bresson’s work). I liked this film, despite not agreeing with the title. The film focuses on a group of racist doofuses (doofi?), including the protagonist Freddy, and Freddy’s girlfriend Marie, who is being pursued by an Arab boy in town. The way that the plot unfolds is pretty predictable, but Dumont’s lulling style kept it interesting for me, and the abruptly graphic sex scenes do provoke… something. Freddy and Marie have aggressive sex inside and outdoors, seemingly moving it out into the wild to better frame the somewhat animal portrayal of their fornication.

The sex in this film is so unarousing that it magnifies the fraudulence of many art films that claim to have sex scenes that are unarousing, scenes that are there for the progression of the ideas in the film or for ‘art’s sake’ (Breillat came to mind). Dumont lenses the sex scenes as if he were filming cow sex. His characters seem to approach their sex in the same manner that I contemplate checking the mail: I kind of look forward to it, I do it every day, it only takes a few seconds, and I ultimately get no satisfaction out of it. Dumont sheds these characters of the minimal physical attraction they have in these scenes with unflattering close-ups and angles of parts of the body that even fit people usually try to conceal. The effect of these scenes is that I interpret the characters actions on a more innate and animal level. Murders and rapes come off as products of human nature, a sense to protect ones territory and invade the territory of others, rather than simply disturbed morals. The characters in this film are ugly people, and they make me feel a little bit more hopeless for mankind.

Picking up where Jésus left off, L’Humanité could very well be focusing on the cop perspective of the previous film. Pharaon opens the film running through the hills of rural France, disturbed by something. He is soon revealed to be a member of the police, and then I was abruptly thrust into an investigation of the rape and murder of a young girl via a shot of her rotting vagina crawling with ants. The body seems to be in the same grassy field, covered maybe with the same ants that were crawling on Freddy, in the closing moments of Jésus. Though I was watching the ‘good guy’ perspective of a crime this time, the film has the same grimy mundanity of Dumont’s debut, and Pharaon’s neighbor and friends Joseph and Domino have the same sort of semi-abusive, territorial relationship that Freddy had with Marie. This film is doing more interesting things formally than Jésus was, though, and its pessimistic study of a man’s perception of humanity feels somehow epic.

The film is doing a lot of confusing things with the crime investigation genre that seems arbitrary to Dumont’s greater goals (much like his exploration of the horror genre in the consequent Twentynine Palms), but it did have me more engaged in the events than I was with Jésus. The meat of the investigation isn’t even introduced until well into the film, perhaps close to an hour into it, and the entire case disappears for long stretches of time and circles itself as if it wasn’t written by the same writer. Interviews are held with people for the sake of interviews, and the entire city seems to be sleepwalking in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Pharaon is the most complex, bizarre, and wonderfully conceived character in any of Dumont’s films so far. He has a naive holiness that makes me understand the Bresson comparisons a bit more than I did after Jésus, and it makes his relationships with anyone, especially Domino, have a tension and an emotion that is lacking in the other three films by Dumont. When Domino leaves Pharaon after they arrange to have dinner for the first time, Pharaon’s giddiness and physical elation is comparable to Adam Sandler’s dancing through the aisles of the dollar store in Punch-Drunk Love. He is awkward and pathetic and sad and genuinely cares for the good in people.

Spoilers — Dumont, showing that he can end his films with the best of them, closes the film with a kind of Silent Light-ish kiss of redemption. Pharaon had always threatened to inappropriately land a wet one on an unsuspecting person, and it goes over the edge at the end here with a shocking and blunt kiss where he seems to be trying to suck the sins out of Joseph. When the film closes with Pharaon in hand cuffs, I felt slightly cheated that Dumont ended the film with a silly and unnecessary ‘open-to-your-interpretation’ cliff hanger. However, after thinking about it a bit more, I think it’s okay, and I came up with a few versions of the ending that I’m not annoyed with.

While I felt less enjoyment watching this than I did while watching La Vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, my thoughts at the end of it were leaning toward this being Dumont’s tightest film. For most of the running time, I had narrowed the film’s accomplishments to being a very elaborate and well shot Hummer commercial. What begins as a Hummer commercial, though, switches gears in the final twenty minutes, and becomes inarguably favorable to the Ford F-350 crew cab. The automobile metaphor is almost as explicit as the nudity and sex scenes, and half-way through I kept thinking to myself ‘okay, I get it.’ Katia, a French bimbo tagging along with her boyfriend David on some sort of getaway to Twentynine Palms, cannot drive. I guess her inability to operate the oversized vehicle is a way of showing her God-given incapability of handling an SUV (as offensive a metaphor as the actual Hummer commercial that suggests that men who eat tofu and eat healthily should buy a Hummer so that they can feel like men again). When she attempts to drive, she steers the slow-moving gas guzzler into bushes and cacti, scratching the paint job and upsetting David. Katia, pretty but a complete airhead, can’t do much of anything, actually, other than provide a hole for David. It was difficult for me to feel sympathy for her, even when the relationship gets abusive toward the end. David is even less likable than Katia, showing insufficient patience for Katia’s weakness in English and throwing temper tantrums that become more and more over-the-top and ridiculous toward the end of the film; the lack of a sympathetic character was the downfall for much of the film for me. However, I felt that the explosion of violence and plot at the end made sitting through the rest of it worthwhile, similar to how the end of The Brown Bunny redeems the tedium of the rest of the film (that film actually has several things very much in common with Twentynine Palms, including as the desert setting, endless driving, and explicit sex).

In Dumont’s films, women are the more dynamic characters, while the male characters all seem to be the same abusive, conservative honkies (save for L’Humanité‘s Pharaon). David is somewhat of a break from this type, in the sense that he seems (for some of the running time) to have a respect for a woman’s ability to think. He also is in a higher class than Dumont’s other male characters, has a decent job, and can at least afford a Hummer and an occasional vacation. That he evolves so abruptly into such a heartless beast is what made the end of the film so unsettling. While Dumont’s other males were somehow believable as rapists and murderers, David’s transformation is the only one that I can say I didn’t expect. There is a useless epilogue that makes up the final scene of this film and doesn’t work at all, ruining the disturbing images of the previous scene. I don’t know what Dumont was thinking when he scripted this, but it began as irritating and eventually came off as an attempt at comic relief. Other than that epilogue that I’m still trying to eliminate from my memory of the film, this is the film that has stuck with me the most out of all of Dumont’s work so far.

I had the chance to see this in Cannes but passed on it after a guy in my line to see a different film that I can’t remember the names of said he saw it and thought it was nothing special and overhyped. I also hadn’t heard of Dumont before, so I passed, and it won the Grand Prix and I was kicking myself. That year, the judges were anti-war happy and fell for Wind That Shakes The Barley and gave it their top prize; it the blandest film I saw at the festival that year. I assumed that this was another film that was awarded for being European and ‘exposing the horrors of war’ and didn’t mind missing it too much. This is certainly a better war-themed film than Ken Loach’s bore, and is one of my favorite war films of all-time now (not that that’s a great accomplishment as I only like a few). It is modest enough to not approach The Thin Red Line‘s brilliance, but it is perfectly tight and effectively horrible. The film’s protagonist is Demester, but the star of the film is Adélaïde Leroux as Barbe. She is a beautiful and complex representation of what I imagine to be the ideal Dumont woman. More than any other slutty female in his oeuvre, every bad decision she made made me cringe and want to grab her and shake her for not being the nice, put-together girl that she should be. She is the main vertex of the love triangle between herself, Demester and Blondel. Demester is the kind of pathetic slob that defines most of the males in Dumont’s films, while Blondel, initially, appears to be the sort of ideal guy that a girl like Barbe should be interested in. The tension that is left in suspension when Demester and Blondel go off to war had me unusually engaged in both characters safety in the dangerous battleground that they unsuccessfully raid. The drama that was put on hold in Flandres from the love triangle would have made an interesting enough film, and so I found myself engaged in Demester and Blondel’s safety primarily for the sake of the excellent payoff once they both returned from the war, or, the more likely scenario, what would happen if one returned without the other. This film studies the complexity of pure masculine nature as seen by Dumont and juxtaposes it with the nature of war, and, as is shown in the ugly rape during battle, the treatment of man by man can be a disgusting thing. Dumont’s characters wander in a world approaching soullessness, and his combination of sex and combat in this film is a vile but potent representation of his core ideas.