Cannes. Flandres.

"If you're looking for a movie that depicts all of humanity as rutting, vicious, unthinking Neanderthals held captive by their animalistic urges, Bruno Dumont is your man," writes Mike D'Angelo for Nerve. "Flanders may well be a fine motion picture, but like all of Bruno Dumont's work, it made me feel assaulted rather than edified."

"Dumont's 'war film' is stronger [than Kaurismäki's], but ultimately lacks the power of his prior movies La Vie de Jesus and Humanité," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Maybe after a week of films at the Cannes Film Festival - with rape, incest, murder, graphic sex and death aplenty - Dumont's work doesn't seem all that shocking. "

Updated through 5/28.

For the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt, it's just "more of the same: A film that had some French viewers talking back to the screen yet received scattered applause at the end. Apparently, you either love this guy's work or hate it. In this review, Dumont will not feel the love."

Updates: Kerstin Gehmlich, reporting for Reuters, nabs a few quote from Dumont: "You can get fed up with war on TV. So the work of the filmmaker is to shed a different light on the role of war."

Time Out's Geoff Andrew: "A damp squib, the movie's main virtue is its 90-minute brevity."

Variety's Deborah Young has her thumb way up, calling the film "a somber, beautifully acted reflection on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man, which only enormous compassion can redeem."

Updates, 5/24: "[S]low, turgid, bleak and brutal," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi, "and watching Dumont try and craft allegories and deeper meanings out of the petty interactions of his thinly-crafted characters and their meaningless actions and cruelties is a bitter experience."

"The only mystery here is how Mr Dumont has gone so quickly from promising young director to such an unsteady, unhappy talent," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "If nothing else, Mr Dumont's nearly 10-year Cannes trajectory from triumph to disappointment indicates that the burden of the auteur hangs over European directors as heavily as it does any digital savant hungry for Sundance."

The Hollywood Reporter's Charles Masters interviews Bruno Dumont.

George the Cyclist calls it "an unapologetic study of man's inner recesses."

Updates, 5/25: The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw: "I'm tempted to call it a cross between Irrevérsible and Saving Private Ryan - but it's better and more interesting than that, and a return to form for this director, after the embarrassment of his woeful Twentynine Palms."

For Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, "it's one of the most powerful films I've seen here, and I found its minimal dialogue and intentional anachronisms (the men ride horses into battle, at least at first) fascinating rather than annoying. Its portrait of war as a brutal, pointless exercise where men from the so-called civilized world are reduced to animal cruelty is familiar, but in its own stark fashion Flanders bears comparison with Paths of Glory and Platoon, with a little of The Sheltering Sky thrown in."

Update, 5/28: Cineuropa's Camillo de Marco interviews Dumont.

Posted by dwhudson at May 23, 2006 8:09 AM