Same time next year?

With Cannes off and running, here're a few fresh notes on a couple of films from last year's lineup that are still baffling many, Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth and Bruno Dumont's Flanders.

"At first glance, Colossal Youth gives the appearance of being almost atemporal, with no clearly delineated narrative, a series of scenes that take place in ambiguously defined present. Though there is some blurring of memory and past/present, the setting of the film is both specific and specifically political." Dave McDougall elaborates.

Updated through 5/19.

"Dumont's is a singularly unpleasant body of work," concedes Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE. "But don't think for a second that unpleasantness precludes magnificence.... It's a cinema that's almost unbearable to watch but that exists ecstatic in the mind long after viewing." He notes the comparisons many have made to Bresson and then explains why he thinks of Kubrick instead.

Whether you agree or not, Nathan Lee's review for the Voice is a mighty amusing read: "Meanwhile, Barbe is getting it in the butt from a toothless, sweet-natured yokel. Later she will discover she's pregnant, light a cigarette, and glare." And so on. The bottom line: "Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his."

Update, 5/17: "After the horrible misstep of Twentynine Palms, Bruno Dumont regains his sense with Flanders," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It's a contemporary 'War is Hell' movie but minus the fashionable condescension in which that familiar bromide comes second to a filmmaker boasting his disapproval of the current Iraq War."

"Dumont's talent is enormous, but it takes far more brains and effort to come to terms with violence than to shoot beautiful images of landscapes," writes Steve Erickson for Gay City News. "Humanité suggested that he could accomplish both, but whether he has anything of substance to say is increasingly questionable."

Updates, 5/18: "In all his films the radical Mr Dumont brilliantly syncs the sounds and images of nature with his characters' inner life to evoke as intense an experience of the natural world as a film can provide," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Like his first two movies, La Vie de Jésus and Humanité, Flanders is a pungent rural symphony; you can practically smell the manure."

Daniel Kasman: "Dumont's formal minimalism rarely results in simple-minded films, but in Flanders the director has whittled down his content to a particularly inane, reductive fable based on the notion that people are beasts."

Darren Hughes is working on a longish piece on Pedro Costa and posts an entry on Colossal Youth. This appears as a parenthetical aside: "When a friend asked why I like Colossal Youth so much, the best answer I could come up with was, 'Because before seeing it, I didn't know film could do that.'" Naturally, he elaborates. "The people of Fountainhas are acted upon, and once personal freedom is eliminated from the equation, the State's intent, no matter how good or just, loses relevance. In other words, Colossal Youth, like [Aaron] Douglas's painting [Aspiration], raises the sticky problem of agency."

Update, 5/19: Aaron Hillis on Flanders for Premiere: "As a fan (and it's important now to ground my tastes), it's upsetting to admit that Dumont's ideas and insights have narrowed with this picture, his relaxed pacing now lethargic, his physically and mentally thick characters too familiar, and his ice-water shocks a bit predictable. It would seem self-parodic if it weren't so damn tragic."

Posted by dwhudson at May 16, 2007 1:34 PM