[critical] TWENTYNINE PALMS

Por its third film, Bruno Dumont leaves the North of France, and takes off to the desert sun of Joshua Tree in California. Has large arid areas, the dry roads and service stations in desert ; we the America fantasized and over again filmed by a plethora of filmmakers. But, from the beginning of the movie, this america, the familiar seems strange. It is empty, unpleasant, industrial, sometimes, distressing often. In the middle of it all, cavorts with a couple of lovers who traverse the expanses at the edge of a big 4×4 everything that there are more american. The supplement freshness is dira-t-on, still it is necessary that the couple understands, because she does not speak the English language as Russian, so they speak in a broken French, what about the romanticism in the language of Molière … The two are still crazy in love with each other, to the extreme. She is jealous does not support the glance of his man landing on another creature, It has a violence at flower of the skin as it releases the more often the time to enjoy in a cry bordering on animality and the pain.

Dumont presents us with, therefore, a couple who loves and tears lost in the depths of a California-provoking or stifling and desert, dark and violent. He drove up the long film, a anguish latent in its characters, its scenery, to its staging, to this america, glaucous. Moreover, “the storm rages” as said by the character played by Katerina Golubeva , and what a storm ! But we’ll get to that later …

Bruno Dumont, as usual, décontenance the viewer too impatient to consume this film like any other, except that … Except that TWENTYNINE PALMS is not a film like the others, its narrative structure does not meet the standards pre-established, the disruptive element, one that starts a story, is not there at the end of the first quarter of an hour, only the contemplation is present, undertaken in the silence or the fury of a sexual relationship. Staging in spring, more sublime, more exalted, but sometimes worth it too, because the story becomes boring. It is known that Dumont loves to take the time and show it off, he likes to make last plans until beyond the conventions and sometimes it annoys… or it’s asleep. However, many things emerge from this imitation of history, this is the strength of Dumont, on little things, it shows a lot, it is still necessary to want to look at it.

“Finally a movie without a franchise.”

Because yes, this film is not “that” contemplative, this is a film of a pessimism terrible, and a violent political attack and philosophy on the world today and in particular the United States,… take back the aesthetics of american movies, the better to explode their society, sacred Dumont ! Use the couple, Adam and Eve, driven out of the garden of Paradise, to find himself in an immense empty space, engaged in sex animal for the pleasure of the flesh, let yourself gradually become corrupted by the consumer society but remain naive as to the violence outside, prowling around them, what is the idea superbly pessimistic… and film ! This is definitely a film without concessions that Bruno Dumont offers still more radical, always at the limit, for that will go on or will wait until the last quarter of an hour of the film, the storm…

Because there, all the underlying power, that Dumont to increase the length of the film, explodes with the real figure of the viewer, who may not stay that méduser, petrified or terrified ! This end is a completion of Man as a race said to be superior, the defeat of the whole human species in all this what holds most vile. The abject is king in the land of Uncle Sam, the pessimism triumph in Dumont, the movie wins in the hearts of the audience …

TWENTYNINE PALMS is reviewed in the framework of the thematic IMAGINARY AMERICANS: WILDERNESS proposed by the Champs Elysees film Festival 2015 ! It will be screened on dimanche 14 June 2015 – 20:00 at Publicis Cinemas