Cinematical

Demester (Samuel Bodin) works a farm in the fields of the French region known in English as Flanders; once upon a time, these were the battlefields of the Great War. Earth that was cut into trenches or dotted with corpses now yields to the plow and gives up life. Barbe (Adelaïde Leroux) has known Demester since they were kids. They know each other well enough; now and then, they walk to the woods and have sex -- furtively, briefly. Demester is being called up to fight in a faraway land, however, and Barbe's spirit is being crushed from within. ...

Flandres is written and directed by Bruno Dumont, whose previous film, 29 Palms, stands out for me as one of the most muddled and unpleasant films I've ever witnessed. Flandres is in a similar vein -- slow, turgid, bleak and brutal -- and watching Dumont try and craft allegories and deeper meanings out of the petty interactions of his thinly-crafted characters and their meaningless actions and cruelties is a bitter experience.

Dumont himself says in the Flandres press notes that "When I prepare my film, I am not  aware of the different stages. ...When I'm shooting and editing, I work at getting back the sentiment, at breaking down the screenplay, which remains purely theoretical." This is an artful way of suggesting that Dumont himself doesn't know what the characters are doing, and that comes through in every moment of the film. I'm not going to dismiss Flandres for being slow -- a common complaint about foreign film -- even though it is. But even the slowest moving object can have force behind it and a destination in mind; Flandres does not.

What's even more apparent is that Dumont has no capacity or interest in even the most basic elements of story. Demester and his unit -- fighting in an unnamed Middle Eastern country -- stumble and shoot their way across the landscape; there's no sense of any tactical goal or broader campaign, just a circumstance created so Dumont can look at the violence of war. Finding a lone woman -- whose solitary presence and youth seem to spring from no circumstance other than what Dumont would like the scene to show -- some members of the unit rape her; later, the men are captured and punished by local troops. We see Demester and his comrade-in-arms Blondel (Henri Cretel) tied to posts in a courtyard, as one of their fellow soldiers is tortured and dragged into their view (and ours) before being shot.

The action -- or, rather, the film -- jumps back to Flanders, where Brise is trying to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, and when we return to Demester and Blondel, they're running away from the compound as a helicopter gunship roars overhead. Confronted with a moment like this, any sensible person is shaken out of the film by the barrage of unanswered questions that come to mind: How did they get free? Who released them? If the helicopter above them is one of theirs, why aren't they being picked up? Where did all the armed partisans on the ground go? But Dumont isn't interested in a real storyline -- he's interested in moments, in visions, in a flat, phony 'realism' that hopes to be seen as profound philosophy but only stands as hollow banality. Watching Flandres, you don't just realize that for all of the fuss about his seemingly provocative style and technique, Dumont is an Emperor without clothes; you're also offered proof over and over that the Emperor is a pretender and a posturing fool.