Samuel Boidin (left), Adélaïde
Leroux, and director Bruno Dumont at Cannes 2006
FLANDRES B+
aka: Flanders
France (91 mi) 2006
‘Scope d: Bruno Dumont
Location, location, location is everything in Bruno Dumont
films, opening this film in familiar territory, as he has done in all three of
his films shot in France, conjuring up his home town of Bailleul in Flanders
near the Belgium border, with an almost SATANTANGO-like opening, hearing only
the natural sounds of a rural farm as the camera peeks around corners of a barn
or stares off into the distant horizon past a vast landscape of well ploughed farmland,
where as far as the eye can see is the faint outline of a town with church
steeples rising high above anything else.
The pillars of morality are a constant reminder looming off in the
distance. But what we are witness to here
is anything but moral, as a promiscuous young girl Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) sneaks
off into the woods or into the barn for 30 second fucks with a strangely
Neanderthal, nearly non-verbal guy, André Demester (Samuel Boidin, who was also in
THE LIFE OF JESUS), neither showing any affection or satisfaction of any kind,
instead it’s just a break in a stifling routine of boredom in her case or
chores in his, as he otherwise spends all day ploughing the fields or shoveling
pig manure. Perhaps because she can, a
new guy is invited to enter the picture, and Barbe becomes infatuated with
hanging out with them both, but she displays more overt affection for the new
guy, which leads to an internalized slow burn of jealousy and resentment in
Demester of an almost biblical proportion.
Everything is filmed with Dumont’s ominously slow pace where every
foreshadowing scene feels like grim foreboding.
Once more, using the Bressonian template, it’s not about the
acting, as Dumont is known for his brilliant use of offscreen sounds and for
using non-professionals, whose silent expressionless gazes could be
interchangeable throughout his films. The
opening fifteen minutes is all about the sounds of feet walking through the
mud, or trampling down a country road or through the brush, allowing the camera
to dwell on shots of feet, slowly building a rhythm of bleak monotony. Oblique reference is made to a letter Demester
received, which instructs him to report for military duty to fight in a war he knows
nothing about, not even where it is, but it’s his letter of introduction to
join the war on terror. Strangely,
Barbe’s other friend will join him as they are both ushered into a foreign
country of unknown origins that features Arabic speaking, dark skinned people,
a stand in for Afghanistan or Iraq (shot in Tunisia). Immediately we witness fisticuffs between
black and white soldiers on the same side, with the white man asserting his dominance,
which is the new world order, the pre-condition for 21st century wars fought by
highly developed industrialized nations against impoverished third world
countries. The white dominated nations
always establish their military strength with a brazen display of superior
sophisticated weaponry (shock and awe), but it doesn’t help them much, as they
are fighting a war against an unseen enemy.
Exquisitely shot by Yves Cape, there’s a gorgeous John Ford-like
panoramic shot across a vast desert expanse with low lying mountains dotting
the landscape, utterly beautiful, with six heavily armed men crawling across
this emptiness on horses, reduced to just barely seen dots on the screen. When we move in close, all we see is the
movement of the horse’s hooves.
What follows is a breakdown in moral order, where murder and
rape are acceptable conditions of war, perpetrated by the men in Demester’s
unit in which he is a willing participant.
But the intensity of war is brilliantly demonstrated in short order as
we are witnessing the slaughter of men by unseen forces, very similar to the searingly
intense scenes in FULL METAL JACKET (1987), perhaps intentionally so, using
that same kind of austere filmmaking style of Kubrick, where everything in the
frame is surgically precise, exactly where it's supposed to be. An abrupt tonal shift in battle confidence
takes place from being top cock on the block to instantly being the hunted,
dehumanized, shamed, and brutalized in retaliation for the horrors they
themselves inflicted without so much as batting an eye. The overriding mood is one of insane fear, as
the inexplicable reality of death hovers over every man, even the ones who
survive. The brutality of war is shown
on dual fronts, both home and abroad, shifting abruptly between continents and even
psychological wavelengths to establish how externalized violence gets
internalized like secondhand smoke, the kind of devastating anguish that may
linger around for years to come or even for the rest of your life, while the
actual bomb blast or rifle shot takes place in mere seconds. It’s a shocking depiction of how we are all
implicated and harmed, no one is spared, not even in this sleepy rural farmland,
the site of some of the worst fighting in WWI, but where decades of uninterrupted
peace seem like light years from the traumatic horrors that inhabit the front
lines of war. The film lacks the unique insight
or originality of his earlier films, but does a much better job implicating the
everyday, ordinary citizens into what has become the overriding world
condition, the war on terror, perhaps leading us to a place where we’ve already
been, but through a different path we've never taken before.
