Rendez-Vous. 4.

Seeing Flandres [site] by Bruno Dumont again, I found myself coming down on the side of the film's supporters.

The word against the film is that it is recycled monosyllabic Dumont and that its view of the lives that its rural characters lead at home or at war is misanthropic. So far those sentiments seem to be shared by the three critics of the New York Times, which may help explain why the major US distributors were shy about bringing Flandres to an audience.

Dumont has a remarkable feel for landscape. Critics might say that the dreary northern French landscape is what we tend to concentrate on in his films, since his camera stands still and his characters don't say much, and they're right. In Flandres, the paradox is that the context that Dumont eschews, as a matter of principal, comes out eloquently in spite of him. The landscape of divided fields and churches on low-lying hills is the battlefield of low-lying graves from the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), and the backdrop for much of early Flemish painting. Adelaïde Leroux, who plays Barbe - the critics will remind you that she seems to have sex more frequently than any farm animal - seems to have walked out of one of those pictures. (The next thing you know, someone will accuse Dumont of plagiarizing the paintings.) Look past the characters, and you see how little has changed. The farming life of Flandres, with its constant sound of boots in the mud (the same sound made by coupling bodies shaking there), has some surprising resemblances to the life that these peasants lived centuries ago.

No surprise that these farm boys go right into the army, and into an unspecified foreign war. Where do you think the soldiers in Iraq war are coming from? (Think about it - with Baghdad a lethal zone, and the prospect of getting the right medical care if you're wounded shattered by recent news, it's logical that the US Army would sign up anyone with a pulse. Flandres doesn't seem so far-fetched.)

Flandres was another battlefield, the region in which lines and the trenches marking those lines shifted during World War I, where the graves are even closer to the surface than those of the Hundred Years War, and millions more died. Those lingering shots in Flandres of a tractor driven by the young farmer Demester (Samuel Boidin) churning up wet soil aren't just pounding the impression into the audience that the peasant life is an existence of stultifying boredom. It's a reminder that these characters are literally walking on top of millions of corpses.

Now that the rural Europe that these characters inhabit is a place of relative peace - unlike Yugoslavia or the volatile banlieues that barely appear in the films of this year's Rendez Vous with French Cinema - its young men are shipped off to foreign wars that don't sem to have any relation to their lives at home. For many of them, it will be the only escape from that life.

Misanthropic? Mean-spirited? Flandres is about characters who have no learning and no opportunities, who trudge through the same lives that their parents had. In war they behave as soldiers do - we've seen and heard enough testimony about what's happened in Iraq to know that Dumont's segment in which the young men from Flanders rape a Muslim girl is neither exaggerated nor implausible. American soldiers have been put on trial by the US military for crimes far worse than that.

Instead of entertaining silly suggestions that the dour Dumont try his hand at musical comedy or inject a joke or two, why not just pair Flandres with The Deer Hunter and see what people think?

Posted by dwhudson at March 4, 2007 6:36 AM