Twentynine Palms

HARDCORE SEX was a sign that Bruno Dumont was a serious filmmaker, because the rutting in his first two movies, La Vie de Jésus and L'Humanité, was certainly not titillating. Dumont's characters were part of a loveless universe, trapped in almost hostile societies. They were souls—psyches, if you like—inhabiting average, unprepossessing bodies, and Dumont distinguished himself by looking at their physical world without emotion or melodrama. His new movie Twentynine Palms continues his hardcore style, but this time it's just blunt, not revelatory.

David and Katia (David Wissak and Katia Golubeva) are a photographer and his European girlfriend who flee Los Angeles to explore Joshua Tree National Park. Their sexual bouts at the Twentynine Palms motel and in the surrounding desert reduce them to animal instincts, but Dumont also reduces his vision to the near-scientific scrutiny of a microscope. David and Katia are photographed as biomorphic images, their body shapes resembling the texture and curves of the rocks they explore and frolic upon. Filming for the first time in the United States, French-born Dumont means to re-orient our perspective, to show mountains, desert and sky as equal to or dominating the people in the landscape. Watching their sex acts is like observing insects fucking. It is a natural but unenlightening experience.

Dumont's plain style almost becomes spellbinding in its rough doggedness, but after a while no insight occurs to replace this unenraptured view of nature and sex. (Think about the exalted vision in Godard's Nouvelle Vague of clasping hands against a background of empty sky or his nearly tactile composition of an old, knotted tree. Images of more-than-physical longing.) In Twentynine Palms, sex on the rocks becomes clinical—exactly what some critics have wrongly said about Son Frère. Dumont has gotten so far beyond his earlier perception of precise social behavior in France's hinterlands that Twentynine Palms becomes a thesis movie rather than a life study.

Wissak and Golubeva expose their bodies for Dumont's literal version of way-West existentialism. Dumont's motel-pool fuck scene is less intriguing (and less beautiful) than a David Hockney sketch. David and Katia's search for a place in the world, seeking a space useable for life (or love) doesn't match Antonioni's supernal view of Death Valley in Zabriskie Point. Dumont and his contemporary fans may not be aware of Antonioni's 1970 foray into the American experience, yet it's imperative that a connection, a judgment, be made about that inspired exposition and this pointless one. Antonioni's orgy in the desert evoked a worldwide folly of desperate cultural revolution whereas Dumont simply offers an uninformed vision of two particular people who are lost. Why? Because he's lost.

I had avoided writing about Twentynine Palms even though I greatly admired Dumont's first two films, because this time his audacity was enervating. The vision of spiritual struggle in the masterly L'Humanité was hard-earned; Dumont proposed a precarious transcendence from the crime melodrama into hermeneutical speculation. (It suggested an uncanny collaboration between Sam Fuller and Robert Bresson, rather than the dilettante pretenses of Lars von Trier.) Replacing generic sensationalism with deep moral inquiry was a difficult task. Dumont won my respect because he forced viewers to sharpen their perception and commit to the kind of sincerity that movies like Kill Bill ridicule or sentimentalize. Twentynine Palms is less serious, from its banal symbolic use of The Jerry Springer Show as a measure of human temerity to its climactic male rape and horror movie denouement. These developments simply seem like the dumb idea of someone who never saw Deliverance or Psycho.

All that remains is Dumont's philosophical blatancy; his dessicated pornography is more punishing than edifying. Actress Golubeva is always game, but compare these sex scenes (with Wissak roaring his orgasm like a wounded beast) to her graphic cunnilingus in Leos Carax's unforgettable Pola X. Carax also eschewed cheap sex, but his phantasmagoric inclination visualized "intolerable anguish and voluptuous surrender" (qualities that critic Robin Wood once credited to Hitchcock). Dumont has traveled to the West Coast only to miss the money shot that matters. Tourist, go back home.

YOUNG ADAM Ewan McGregor suffers writer's block in Young Adam, but his libido is in overdrive. Working on a barge in Scotland, he and his boss Peter Mullan pull a dead woman's body out of the river Clyde. While Mullan's away, McGregor screws Mullan's wife, barge-owner Tilda Swinton, in close quarters or on the riverbank. Between bouts, McGregor flashes back to his affair with Emily Mortimer, a young lass who prefers to get it on on the wharf. Indoors, she insults McGregor about his sloth. Unable to write, he cooks custard; unable to justify his indolence, he knocks her down, pours the custard on her head, squeezes ketchup on her, douses her with a bottle of mustard for good effect, empties a box of salt on the gal and then buggers her in the puddle of condiments.

If this brief description seems like a set-up for a dirty joke, it's because that's essentially what Young Adam is—but hold your laughter. Director David Mackenzie has adapted a 50s-era novel by Alexander Trocchi with grimy yet picturesque images of sex to convey, all too well, a sense of disenchantment. The murder-mystery framing device (it's Mortimer's body that's fished out at the start) pegs McGregor's deep carelessness and irresponsibility. His rampant life force hinted at in the title has caused some critics to compare this film's plot to Alfie, the 1966 story of a ne'er-do-well ladies man starring Michael Caine.

But Mackenzie and the usually elegant Tilda Swinton (here reduced to art groupie) are after bigger game. It seems Young Adam has been made as a dank version of Jean Vigo's 1934 L'Atalante. Yet, instead of Vigo's lyrical representation of sexual longing among newlyweds on a barge, these filmmakers depict joyless sex and fruitless labor. The full-frontal screwing represents a measure of life without moral purpose, Dumont-style. Our randy boy McGregor lets an innocent man go to the gallows for Mortimer's death, which was actually nothing more than a post-coital accident, shown as Monty Python slapstick.

The bad joke continues in a pub where McGregor rents lodging from an acquaintance (and screws the man's wife when she isn't feeding her newborn). McGregor's barge-boss also introduces him to her sister, who takes him to a pub and confesses her love for gin. She orders shots for the both of them and then delivers the film's second-best line, "Drink up! You've got work to do." Cut to the couple in the alley finishing their dirty deed. While wiping the human stain from her dress, the woman gets off the best line, "Look what a mess you've made of me!" She could be describing the film itself.

THE PUNISHER Sex is the best thing about The Punisher, but with an unexpected erotic appeal. Thomas Jane plays Frank Castle, the FBI special agent who becomes a vigilante after his family is wiped out by a mobster (John "Pay Me" Travolta). It's your basic Batman plot: superheroism replaced by all-too-human vengeance. However, no big-screen comix hero has come as physically equipped as Thomas Jane, whose body seems to be the result of equal iron-pushing and eroticized righteousness.

The Punisher is appealing for its old-fashioned fight between good and evil, especially when Castle defends his three outcast neighbors: obese John Pinette, multiply pierced Ben Foster and abused waitress Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. The routine action becomes satisfying when Castle is lifted out of his grief by Romijn-Stamos' comely attention. Not even Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer in Tim Burton's Batman Returns rival the allure of Thomas Jane and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.

"You're one of us, you're family," Romijn-Stamos says to Jane, announcing director Jonathan Hensleigh's theme of social unity. But Jane and Romijn-Stamos are superb specimens of physical maturity, each with an innocent-seeming sexual precocity. They're both strapping androgynes, and the movie's only real failure is not capitalizing on their likenesses as a winning team. A friend described the "seething vitality" of the women in Kill Bill. But their vigilante violence can't match Jane and Romijn-Stamos' gentleness, simplicity or sexy justification.