<
strong>L'HUMANITE 1999
Directed by Bruno Dumont
141 minu
tes
In French with English subtitles
French director Bruno Dum ont always takes us on a sacred/spectral journey that is bleak and sublime . Where most filmmakers are content to tell a simple story, Dumont is alwa ys more soul-searching. His movies are a strange mix of carnality, existen tial void, and spirituality. This one focuses on detective Pharaon De Wint er, as he investigtes the murder and rape of a young 11-year-old girl. The brutal inhumanity of this act rattles the detective, and it's impossible for him to comprehend/ reconcile that such obscenity is possible.
S o although on the surface this is a police procedural based on a situation like a typical cop flick, Dumont instead turns the tables and it becomes an eerie exploration of our central character's psyche. After all, detecti ve movies are about a search for the truth, it's only that Dumont redirect s what kind of truth is uncovered. And if the truth is revealed, it will n ot be a banal resolution/ conclusion like so many other crime movies. In f act, L'humanité warps genre conventions to the degree that some people hav e said it's not a police film, but the opposite...an anti-policier.
When it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, it totally polaris ed the audience. People were shouting, screaming and storming off, while o thers were in rapture..... including the head of the jury David Cronenberg who showered L'humanité with the Grand Jury prize, and the best acting aw ards went to Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele. The fact that both top awarded actors were non-professionals was perceived as an insult, a slap in the face to professional careerism, and only added fuel to the outrage. By the way, director Dumont is actually well known for casting his movies by going to unemployment centres in rundown areas of the country. In any case, all these things together blew up and created an international scand al.
The feral murder of the young girl is certainly a desecration, but it's one that reveals another desecration.... not of a church, but of an entire landscape - the post-industrial, rundown, working-class rural re gion in northern France of Bailleul. A world that has been exploited, ruin ed and abandoned. That's where the story takes place, and where the direct or himself was born and raised.
In the 1960s in France there was a string of movies implying that the police and criminals have more in comm on than people believe. They both have the same mentality and use the same methods (threats, violence, blackmail, punishment, sometimes even torture ). This movie takes it a step further where cops who represent law and ord er might have aspects in common with the people they are hunting down, and who they describe as mentally disabled/ill. This is a movie that captures something unhinged, unstable... a twilight zone where things might not be so black-and-white as they are presented. As always in Dumont's work, it' s about spiritual suffering in the modern world.
CINEMA DÉR
IVE - ventilator space
Overtoom 301, 2nd floor
Doors ope
n at 19:30, film starts at 20:00
3 euros