stensson 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.

Johnny Vinther Jensen (prometheus-dk) Truly one of the worst films, I have ever had the intense displeasure of watching. Bruno Dumont and his hyper-minimalist style is an affront to anyone who takes film seriously. What he does is to remove everything that makes cinema work: acting, dialogue, music, editing, visual language. He reduces, what I think could be an engaging story, to a pseudo-documentarist look at characters that I ultimately don't give a sh** about! You see, that's what happens when you refuse to use any of the tools of the trade to form a connection with your audience; you don't get one. In the rape scene, where Demester and his friends come upon an Arab girl and gang-rape her, I didn't feel anything. When Demester leaves his friend to die, i didn't feel anything. And when Demester returns home and tells his (for lack of a better word) girlfriend that he loves her, I didn't feel anything. That's what I took away from the film: Nothing, except of course the overwhelming feeling of having wasted an hour and a half of my life that I will never get back. I won't deny, that Dumont has an eye for images. His montage-technique is quite good (although his belief that it can carry an entire movie is preposterous to say the very least). Especially the first ten minutes of the film demonstrate this. However because it never moves beyond that, I can never quite bring myself to care about what happens to the characters. If you like minimalism (which I'm not opposed to by principle), I suggest to check out film by Carlos Reygadas or some of the Italian masters. At least save yourself having to sit through 90 minutes of some pseudo-intellectuals director's formalistic experiments. Shun it! Shun it as you would a rabid dog.

paulscofield68 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.

matt-szy Bruno Dumont does not like expressions on people faces. The characters in his films do not act with facial expressions. Instead they move and talk and look around like any real live person might do except with no emotion. This is called minimalism. Dumont directs his actors to portray as minimal emotion, reaction, sensation as possible. This does not mean he does not take the face into consideration. No, no. It is in the face that we can see the person, what they have been through, how much they might have suffered, experienced, etc. In fact, Dumont chooses faces well. And what Dumont does better than choose the faces of his actors is he creates a sense of emotions, internal confusion, and unguided motivation in a world that exists solely between the boundaries of our vision and the outermost layer of our eyes. We see this in Flandres.What could and usually is, in cinema, a way to convey emotions is by framing facial expressions which usually follow or/and precede dialogue. Dumont simplifies this process and leaves any emotional identification more up to interpretation, and consequently having us rely on our own feelings as viewers to understand the characters depth rather than understanding the characters feelings – for as it seems, for Dumont, feelings are a rather difficult thing to express.Dumont does this by montage. The main character, Demester, a weird but thoughtful looking guy, is with the girl he does not call his girlfriend, Barbe, on the day before he leaves to war. They are sitting before a bonfire in the French country side during winter. They are met by the guy who the Barbe recently met at a bar, Blondel, a pretty looking boy. Barbe and Blondel have sex right away in the parking lot. Demester watches this happen but does not react. Both Blondel and Demester are going to war and will be in the same brigade. Barbe is sitting between them. They simultaneously lay back in the grass. Barbe takes turns kissing them, leaning from one side to Demester then to Blondel, telling them how much she will miss them both. Demester sits up. He stares off in the distance, detached from the situation. After seeing his blank face for a while we cut to a silhouette of a tree in the distance with the flat and frozen winter country in the background. The tree has no leaves, it's branches reach out wildly in all directions. A few moments pass. And cut.Sex in Dumont's films is often brutal and sad, and is always short. The girls never appear to get pleasure out of sex and the guy is always mechanical and numb. Demester and Barbe walk silently for some time to an isolated grassy area where they do not kiss, Barbe only pulls down her pants and says, "do you want me?" at which point Demester gets on top of Barbe. It is as though the characters in Dumont's films are simplified to their basic animal needs and that sex is the only means to some deeper connection. In "The Life of Jesus" the main boy and his girl are often in the background of a scene kissing at a slugs pace with no elevation of excitement, receiving no reaction from friends nearby, frozen in a suction like mouth to mouth. Likewise, in a scene in "Humanity" sex is shot from a wide angle in a long take revealing the banality of the act.Shots of repetitive motions often last for awkwardly moments. As Demester is plowing though a field – he is a farmhand – with a tractor a close up of the blades slicing through mud and dirt underline the mere ugliness and mechanical repetitive nature of things. Shots and repetition like this persist in all Dumont's films. In "The Life of Jesus" it is the sight and sounds of the Scooters, the monotone kissing of the young couple, and in "Humanity," it is the legs of a man riding a bike, among others, which the viewer is forced to watch obsessively.Above all Dumont is a moralist, however subtle. He shows us the thoughtlessness of our actions. Flandres is, in short, about a guy who does not know if he loves a girl. He leaves to war, and there he rapes, kills, witnesses killing, leaves behind a fellow soldier in order to save himself, gets lost, and is himself nearly killed in a few situations. His life is spared not by any of his good deeds, for there are few, instead his life is spared by none other than blind luck. He is not special. He is just lucky. And after having returned home to his little simple life in the French countryside, unable to verbalize this experiences to Barbe, the only words he is able to conjure up, after some difficulty, is I love you.