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When an 11-year-old girl is brutally raped and murdered in a quiet French village, a police detective who has forgotten how to feel emotions–because of the death of his own family in some kind of accident–investigates the crime, which turns out to ask more questions than it answers.Read More »
One of the most controversial figures in current French cinema, Bruno Dumont made a dazzling debut with his 1997 film The Life of Jesus (which won the Sutherland Trophy at that year’s Festival) and divided audiences with his metaphysically charged Humanity. Following his American road nightmare Twentynine Palms, Flanders goes back to his roots: it’s at once a return to the introspective register of Jesus… and, like it, a contemplation of his home territory. The characters are a group of young men and women from the Northern French countryside, including farmer Demester (Boidin) and his none-too-exclusive girlfriend Barbe (Leroux). Read More »
Lawrence Garcia, Cinemascope wrote:
In the seven years since P’tit Quinquin, it has become impossible to continue tagging Bruno Dumont with the longstanding clichés of Bresson criticism. Epithets like “ascetic,” “severe,” “punishing”—already limited descriptors of his first two works, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L’humanité (1999)—have only become more obviously incapable of describing Dumont’s recent films, from the carnivalesque contortions of Ma Loute (2016) to the musical extremes of his Jeanne d’Arc movies. Still, as Dumont’s methods (particularly his increasingly frequent use of professionals alongside non-actors) have ostensibly moved away from those of Bresson, the deeper affinities between the two filmmakers have only become clearer. Read More »
A young woman of privilege compensates a familial spiritual emptiness with her love of Christ. When she consumes herself too zealously, she is kicked out of the convent, being told that she’ll find her freedom in the world… Her thirst of absolute, her inclination for sacrifice and for a meaning to her life guides her to the “right person” who turns her aspirations into action…Read More »
In the 15th century, both France and England stake a blood claim for the French throne. Believing that God had chosen her, the young Joan (Lise Leplat Prudhomme) leads the army of the King of France. When she is captured, the Church sends her for trial on charges of heresy. Refusing to accept the accusations, the graceful Joan of Arc will stay true to her mission.
—ProductionRead More »
Synopsis “Jeanette” is a musical drama based on Charles Peguy’s play “Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc” (1910). It focuses on the part of Peguy’s play that deals with Joan of Arc as a child, from age 8-12, when she started to embrace her sacred mission.
Coincoin and the Extra Humans review: Bruno Dumont raises a stink in a small town
| Sight & Sound
Ben Nicholson 15 August 2018
There was something rotten in the soil of northern France in Bruno Dumont’s blackly comic mini-series, P’tit Quinquin (2014). A four-episode television mystery that was also released as a single feature film, it was a confounding and macabre parody of a procedural police drama filled with unexpected (for the famously serious filmmaker), and often uncomfortable, laughs. It followed a bumbling duo of gendarmes as they investigated a sequence of grisly deaths in the environs of a small town as a group of mischievous kids, led by the eponymous Quinquin, watched on.Read More »
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With every film he makes, Dumont seems to delve deeper into a humanity that, in its connection to nature in all its mystery and force, is a deeply conflicted one. In “Hors Satan”, the division of what is good and evil and how it relates to the man we encounter at the start of the film, is somewhat less clear-cut.
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Is there a more extraordinary auteur career than that of Bruno Dumont? Having started as one of Europe’s foremost purveyors of extreme cinema and extreme seriousness, he made a startling move to wacky broad comedy, and is handling it as if to the manner born. Now he gives us Ma Loute, or Slack Bay, a macabre pastoral entertainment by the seaside from the belle époque: it’s an old-fashioned provincial comedy with something of Clochemerle, a world in which everyone seems to have drunk their bodyweight in absinthe. There’s also the surreal meta-strangeness of Ken Russell’s version of The Boyfriend.Read More »