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L'Humanité Reviews

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Bruno Dumont drew attention with his first film, La vie de Jésus (1997), a realistic portrayal of the miserable existence of people in a small town north of France. His second film, L'humanité, also takes place in Bailleul, the nondescript Flanders town of the previous film, and the hero of this film, Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotte), is also a loner who lives with his mother. Their house was owned by Pharaon's grandfather, a famous painter. The opening scene shows Pharaon walking in a freshly plowed field. He throws himself onto the moist soil to feel it and to smell it. Thirty-year-old Pharaon, a simple and unsophisticated man, has a crush on his sexy neighbor, factory worker Domino (Severine Caneele), a gentle soul in love with a brute named Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaon's daily life is quite dull; he is a police lieutenant, a job that does not agree with his mild temperament in which he has to investigate the rape and murder of a little girl. What makes Pharaon different from others is the suffering he goes through due to his uncontrollable empathy for other human beings. He is an emotional sponge condemned to carry the burden of all our wrongdoings. He is hungry for human feeling to the point that he would smell the face of the suspect he interrogates. In the final analysis, he also is a Jesus figure, like the hero of the first film. The message is that there is no place for such figures in our cruel world. L'humanité won the Grand Prize of the 52nd Cannes Film Festival in 1999. Severine Caneele shared the Best Actress award with Emilie Dequenne of Rosetta and Emmanuel Schotte won the Best Actor award.

Reviewed By: Elbert Ventura

At once glacial and gripping, profound and pretentious, Bruno Dumont's L'Humanite is an ostensible police procedural that has far more on its mind than the usual machinations of a whodunit. The movie's grandiose intentions are advertised in its very title. Clocking in at just under two-and-a-half hours, this ponderous and, at times, maddening film threatens to buckle under the weight of its ambition and purpose. Capturing human activity with Swiftian frankness, Dumont sketches an unflattering portrait of people as little more than animals. This outlook is perhaps best exemplified by the startling sexual imagery in the movie: his sex scenes are drained of prurience and filmed as sweaty, unattractive, and purely animalistic acts. The unnerving rigor of his gaze extends beyond the sexual. As tactile a film as one will ever see, the movie captures physical details with startling immediacy, from the quiet rustle of grass on a windy day to the glistening patch of sweat on a man's neck. If Dumont's technique leaves little room for ambiguity, his story certainly doesn't. With a police officer-cum-holy innocent as its unlikely protagonist, the crime story trudges to a perplexing conclusion best not discussed here. Suffice to say that the ending is more suggestive than conclusive. For all the head-scratching it might inspire, the cryptic final frame is perfect in its own way, lacing a parting frisson of mysterious transcendence to Dumont's brutal and taxing vision of humanity.