Humanité

After seeing L'Humanite at the Edinburgh festival, it's difficult to imagine it winning the Cannes Grand Jury Prize as well as the best actor and actress awards. The film is an unquestionably beautiful but otherwise unremarkable example of French cinema. Call me a stuffy American, but I found the opening sequence of the rape victim's damaged body to be completely unnecessary. The film's title is the most pretentious in recent memory.

This film has been praised as shocking, fascinating, and hypnotic; and I can only conclude that I'm not easily shocked, fascinated, or hypnotized. I was lulled to sleep several times, and watched the film over the course of several days. The film is quite sedately paced. An example:

You get a shot of Pharoan looking at his boss's collar. The shot of the collar holds long enough for you to think "Hm, he sweats a lot." The shot holds long enough for you to think "okay, I got that, thanks. He sweats a lot." Then it holds long enough for you to think "All right already! Go wake up the editor."

A sequence like that would not be a problem when the cinematography is particularly good, except the cinematography in this film is not. It is competent, straightforward, unstylized, perhaps even dull; in other words, the cinematography serves the story perfectly.

The sedate pacing might not be a problem with different cinematography, which would affect the story for the better: the film is a psychological exploration, yet the people we're meant to sympathize with are typically shown in long shots or in closeup but with largely unchanging expressions. If something is going on behind the eyes, we can only guess what it is; and from the slack-jawed expression, we guess that what it is might not even be particularly profound. Wounded, yes, sad, yes, but we've seen that before and better, and it's nothing new. We need a reason to care *this time*, and for many people that reason won't be there.

The main character is a cipher, perhaps deliberately so, but the result is a film that doesn't tell you anything, and doesn't even tell you why it doesn't tell you anything--not the nihilism or the weary practicality of some noir films, but merely a bloated anecdote with an obscure or missing point. Unfortunately the anecdote, aside from being quite slow, is also almost completely humorless. The result is a film only for people with extraordinary patience and good will.

In this case, largely one man's reality, although several others are involved. I hesitate to make literary comparisons, because film is a visual medium with its own immediacy, but the central characters of the novels by Emmanuel Bove and Patrick Susskind ("The Pigeon" in particular) put me very much in mind of Pharaon de Winter, the "hero" of this film and is one reason I love it. The inwardness,the soulful need that is barely understood by the man himself, the sometimes interminably slow pace bring a profound melancholic tone that I have rarely experienced on the screen.

I agree with others who've posted here, this isn't a film for everyone. But if you are moved by the deep existential reflection and quiet, sensitive behavior of a person who can empathize out of his/her own pain, I would recommend this movie.

The French writer-director Bruno Dumont achieves something rarely accomplished since TAXI DRIVER and ERASERHEAD: a way of looking at the world entirely afresh. Unlike those movies--or the recent, Expressionist CLEAN, SHAVEN--Dumont doesn't distort the physical world, make it elastic or dreamlike. But he somehow makes us feel the world is being recorded by a very wise child from another planet. Everything, absolutely everything, from human behavior to wind rippling over a field of grass, is seen as never before. Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new" is stamped on every frame.

Pharaon is a slow-witted police superintendent who is anything but pharaonic. He had a girlfriend and a baby, now dead. (We are not told how.) He is friends with Domino, a big-boned, sensitive, slatternly woman next door, and Joseph, her handsome beau, with whom she seems to never stop having sex. In their small town, a little girl has been raped and murdered. Pharaon pursues this case, as he pursues a sort of inarticulate love for Domino. Along the way, a light dawns in Pharaon--a dreadful light. He becomes sensitive to the suffering of all living things--a pig hurt by the suckling of her young, all the way to a motorist getting a beating outside police headquarters. The effect this has is to create a kind of moral schizophrenia in Pharaon: he can filter out nothing. Like an overlap of Raskolnikov and Prince Mishkin, Pharaon takes both the world's sin and sufferings on his back.

But this gives only the barest outline of the experience of L'HUMANITE, which is not about its plot. Indeed, the relationship of Dumont's handling of the materials of cinema to the story itself is unique in my experience of narrative moviemaking. Like Abbas Kiarostami in his recent work, Dumont uses the landscape not to illustrate the story, but to propose a dialectic against it. Where the landscape acts as an argument for life in Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY, here it does something else. It vibrates with feeling. In its childlike gaze at the hardness of people and things, L'HUMANITE tries to get at the shifting feelings underneath--the emotions and sensations so elusive there are no words for them. The movie proves that literary means--finding names--are unnecessary. Dumont finds aural-visual-rhythmic means to voice those emotions.

His techniques can be daring, appalling. Pharaon, gradually overwhelmed by the world's thousand and one cruelties, starts to spontaneously embrace (relative) total strangers, in scenes one can imagine giving audiences giggles. Dumont doesn't care.

L'HUMANITE is the kind of movie that, while you're watching it, you feel can drive you crazy in places, but which you know you'll live with and re-play in your head for the rest of your life. And Cannes naysayers to the contrary, all the performances in this movie--all of them, down to the tiniest--are perfect.

A note: I would like to thank the other people who wrote about L'HUMANITE on IMDB. With no other movie have I felt I learned so much by reading other people's responses, and particularly noting the details they chose to underline. For the authenticity and unabashedness of everyone's responses, I am truly grateful.

On the surface, L'Humanite is about a detective, Pharaon, dealing with his hyper sensitive nature to a rape/murder of a young girl he is investigating, but especially for his unrequited love to his neighbor, Domino. Pharoan is like a wounded, or fearful child, dumpy, perpetually slumped over, soft spoken, watery eyed, whereas Domino is considerably working class, modern, damaged, but not nearly as fearful, at least, not as openly sensitive; unlike Pharaon, she doesn't wear her fear like bad suit. But, that is just the surface of the characters and story, the actual definition of these key elements is left up to the viewer. The plot and the characters are fragments. Instead of miring itself in details, long monologues, heavy dialogue in general, or normal cinematic conventions, the film is purposefully left incomplete in many areas. Thus, the viewer is left to speculate how these gaps should be filled, left to ponder the scraps given to them.

For example, we are told Pharaon's girlfriend and child left him, but not why. Is Pharaon's sensitivity a product of his being abandoned by this woman, or was his sensitivity the cause of her leaving? Domino is clearly upset when Pharaon mentions the case of the rape/murder of the young girl, but is her reaction just empathy, or something deeper? For every detail we are given, there are often unresolved questions that are never conveniently answered.

It somewhat reminds me of a Shohei Imamrua film, like Vengeance is Mine or The Eel, in that the story unfolds through rather mundane scenes, but these scenes end up speaking volumes over the course of the film. You could also say it is a bit like Antonioni as well, as the ordinary, often bright, landscape often contributes just as much emotion as the characters. Basically, Brumo Dumont, like Imamura or Antonioni, eschews normal narrative conventions to tell a story. He lets the viewer fill in the gaps, and much of the film will always remain an engaging mystery.