Review of Flandres by Bruno Dumont

with almost unknown actors

Adélaïde Leyroux (Barbe)
Samuel Boidin (André)

made in France 2006




For many viewers at least the first quarter of this film seems to feel more boring than anything else. They seem unwilling to fill a straight, unromantic shot with imagination. Maybe because André's gazing silence reminds too much of reality, of any passive moments in anyones life...? Even though it contains sex!

There is almost no city life present, simply the farm, the woods, the desert, the war, the ruins. One single bar scene could have led to something more social. Anyway Barbe's behaviour of seeking intimacy with every boy in the neighborhood, reflects more of a need for company than for actual kicks. She can bee like the bee queen. However the man who kisses her best (or the only one who does it) becomes during wartime the object for her longning love.

Suddenly though two more quarters have passed, and feels like I have already experienced a full rich movie. Few but surprising intrigues are what drives and spins the film around. Bruno Dumont can be a brutal movie maker. His abrupt changes between "indifference" and "chock" I regognize from his earlier film Twentynine Palms (from 2003, three years before Flandres). There the main theme was nudity in nature, sex everywhere, much more overwhelming than here. Maybe he wants to portray animalism by humans, like a dense version of Paradise, with some complete cruelty. But this time the cruelty comes a little more from the main characters, not pure victims.

I love movies with actors just moving around, not talking much, as in this one. On the other hand I'm not into action films. No, I appreciate the deep emotions of drama, as in this one. It feeds on unclear expectations of what will meet the persons, then lives on facing the pain of what really did.

No clothes, settings or intrigues can be linked to the real war of Flandres in early 20th century. The anonymous war in this movie some french guys are going to Tunisia to fight. There we can follow the karma of treating strangers "like holes", even though not always the right person gets the bad karma here. Probably there grows misinterpretations from both sides.

What I would be most interested in is which other movies viewers could compare Flandres to. Roger Ebert named Mouchette by classic Robert Bresson. My friend forced to compare, mentions that Kim Ki-duk's south korean films can contain similar ingredients, moral conflicts, showing them in rather physical than mental scenery, through seasons of the year. An imdb-guy sees similarities to the finish climate, full of silence, wrath and just being in the woodland. I can agree, there is a concrete mystery, like in Sauna of Antti-Jussi Annila.

However for my eyes Tarkovsky comes as close. Of course not the whole register of Tarkovsky, cause he possesses spoken philosophy and spiritual ideas in a way that Dumont didn't even want to do. Not at least the worlds of Stalker or Mirror reflects "the same" relation to nature, internal processes growing through an unspecified time which seems endless and unbroken. Had Bruno Dumont instead of accepting consciously "ugly" camera-angles struggled to make his masterpieces beautiful, the resemblence to Tarkovsky might have been very big. Now it's more like they happen to meet in similar fields of art.










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