Bruno Dumont/France/2003; R4
Accent/RS, $24.95 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

THERE weren’t many people who liked this film when it was shown at the 2004 New Zealand International Film Festival. I think I was one of five people that I knew who actually liked it – most other people had a rather extreme reaction against it. It’d be easy to see why: it’s slow, repetitive and ultimately brutal. But it also works. There’s something about its tone, its vision of mankind that’s ultimately a rather distressing and disturbing one, and even for people who hated it, sticks with them for a long time after.

It’s a horror film – it follows the typical conventions of horror set-ups – a routine “normal” existence that is slowly punctuated by something unexpected. Except Dumont skews when these events happen. He creates an excessively moody atmosphere throughout, as a foreign couple travel through the desert in Southern California. They argue, they have animalistic sex, they eat, they expel fluids. Typical everyday stuff. It’s the ending which has caused the biggest controversy, and I’m not entirely sure it’s necessary (though to some extent, the sex scenes work their way up to the conclusion). It might be more a way to rattle the cage to get free advertising for the film (and that said, it worked perfectly in that respect) rather than expound his philosophical points. But anyway, it still highlighted how we may try and protect ourselves in a fortress and with a careful routine, but externally, things will always happen that can change our lives without warning.

Dumont films his characters dwarfed by the external environment. He’s heavily influenced by Matisse, but you can also sense the pessimism towards mankind of Guy de Maupassant in there. His characters basically crawl around the desert like Adam and Eve, clearly no longer in paradise (Dumont is staunchly anti-religion). It has been said this film is an anti-American diatribe – I’d disagree – it seems he focused more on the landscape to make his philosophical point about mankind in general rather than using it to simply attack the United States. This is certainly a brutal film; while not perfect, it seeps in and remains in the bloodstream for a long time afterwards.


THE DVD extras are few, containing a number of trailers from similarly controversial films such as 9 Songs and Irreversible. There’s also a brief comment from Dumont, but nothing much else.