Flanders
Directed by Bruno Dumont
After the horrible misstep of Twentynine Palms, Bruno Dumont regains his sense with Flanders. It’s a contemporary “War is Hell” movie but minus the fashionable condescension in which that familiar bromide comes second to a filmmaker boasting his disapproval of the current Iraq War. Dumont’s blunt, tough detachment from his characters’ behavior is refreshingly non-partisan. But first, it’s alarming.
As in his previous movies, The Life of Jesus, Humanity and the unpalatable Twentynine Palms, Dumont approaches humanity almost scientifically, except that he brings what must be called a spiritual perception to an otherwise almost anthropological study. His universe comprises a simple pity for the rugged road of human existence. In Flanders, two young men—Andre (Samuel Boidin) and Blondel (Henri Cretel) from a Flemish farming community—are conscripted into a far-off war. The meanness of their lives is emphasized through their desperate emotional connections forged with the same girl, Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux). And Barbe’s frustration is as puzzling and unrelenting as the boys’.
Working-class life is not romanticized here; in fact, it is set up to mirror the lonely antagonism that Andre and Blondel find in the military.
At war in the desert, Andre and Blondel have no illusions to lose. Their minds are already closed off. Dumont specializes in the blinkered and disillusioned, offering a disturbing awareness that the turn-of-the-century’s barbarity and ignorance are commonplace. Andre and Blondel’s heavy brows and mulish features, and raggedy Barbe’s limp gait give them the stunted look of post-communist youth who never enjoyed the advantages of free-market capitalism; they’re denied its glamorous, sexy patina. When engaging in sex in the fields or a barn, their resemblance to farm animals lowers them to dumb instinct, not Hollywood/MTV privilege. Dumont intentionally condenses experience to a naturalistic essence: Blondel and Barbe’s outdoor post-coital moment is conveyed with rasps of exhausted breaths and an upward look at bare, wintry trees.
Such pointed representations of man in nature gives Dumont’s films their unique tone—a purgatorial view of suffering similar to both Bresson and the Dardennes brothers. But Dumont is also cunning. By stressing the most basic human circumstances in Flanders, he encourages a non-maudlin approach to war’s reality—for both the grunt soldiers who participate in it and the homefolk who intuit its impact. Flanders’ truth might impress working class audiences as much as bourgeois audiences.
Because Flanders never explicitly criticizes the war as American folly, Dumont’s audacious theme could be seen as apostasy in liberal film circles. But don’t underestimate the power and complexity of his art. With its title’s knowing reference to the pacifism of World War I, Flanders brilliantly connects to modern images of Iraq and American military.
It’s a spiritual stylization; once Andre and Blondel get to the battlefield, Dumont shifts into hyperrealistic imagery. Infantrymen wear desert camouflage uniforms and arrive on horseback, looking timeless, surreal and evoking the legacy of Western occupation. Other sequences are as aestheticized as films about the Kuwaiti oil fires: Sam Mendes’ Jarhead or Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness. The persistent sight of a smoke cloud in the distance appears as a smudge, marring the elegant desert vista.
Flanders depicts a world conscious of Iraq as a psychological blur shadowing all military incursion. Through the crystalline spatial juxtapositions of Yves Cape’s photography, verdant fields contrast with desert aridity as the West contrasts with the Middle East. Yet, cruelty connects all. In death or torture, both men’s and women’s screams sound horribly final. Dumont resists the decadent ghoulishness that made Twentynine Palms a repugnant fantasy of human savagery. Flanders’ violent scenes are restrained—partly because Dumont, a postmodern artist, is operating through a cultural grid that has made war atrocities already familiar. He amazingly conflates the desert culture clash of the recent Flight of the Phoenix remake with innumerable recent Iraq docs; the soldiers’ intramural hostility recalls Full Metal Jacket, but also the black/white tension that still haunts French cinema after Algeria.
One key sequence is a rape episode that calls up De Palma’s Casualties of War, providing a linchpin to Andre, Blondel and Barbe’s predicament back home where each one’s emotional dislocation originates. During the marauding soldiers’ ethical discussion, one asks, “Is it different if she was a soldier?” Another replies, “A hole is a hole,” revealing a deeper, single-minded lovelessness. In this concise, brilliant film, the cruelty of life and war are distilled. What others see as a quagmire, Dumont sees vividly.
