PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 5/18/07)

As the crowds in France line up for the latest Hou Hsiao-hsien and gawk at the spectacle that is a bee-costumed Jerry Seinfeld buzzing over the Croisette, it's clear that the Cannes Film Festival is heating up this week and trumping all other news cinematic. Meanwhile, last year's Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes, Flanders, slips into U.S. theaters nearly unnoticed this weekend, which is probably for the best.

The sadly underwhelming Flanders marks the fourth feature from French hyper-minimalist provocateur Bruno Dumont, whose brilliant Humanité (1999) and nearly brilliant Twentynine Palms (2003) wildly divided cineaste camps, as any agitator worth their film stock should. Subversively repurposing Robert Bresson's brand of austerity and non-professional casts, Dumont fancies himself an anthropologist of the medium, paring down the basest of human acts (always expect thorny sex scenes) in the bleakest of landscapes to unearth emotions so disturbingly raw that, well, either you like his films or you don't. As a fan (and it's important now to ground my tastes), it's upsetting to admit that Dumont's ideas and insights have narrowed with this picture, his relaxed pacing now lethargic, his physically and mentally thick characters too familiar, and his ice-water shocks a bit predictable. It would seem self-parodic if it weren't so damn tragic.

Samuel Boidin leads as Dumont's galoot du jour André Demester, a provincial farmer who is afraid to express his deeper love for the unstable Barbe (Adélaide Leroux), even after some boredom-breaking casual sex in the soggy fields. In turn, she shows affection towards Blondel (Henri Cretel), but both men are to be shipped off to war in an unnamed desert climate before their triangular dynamics are realized. From there, a gorgeous but go-nowhere series of parallel edits sees Barbe trying to cope with a horrible pregnancy sitch, while Demester and Blondel witness barbarism that comes mostly from their own side, putting the casual in casualty: killing children, raping peasants and vengeful castration are performed with the kind of cynical nonchalance that you'd sooner expect from a Gaspar Noé nightmare. Yes, yes, mankind is a horde of terrible beasts no better than farm animals, but didn't Dumont already tell us so in his last few films?

—Aaron Hillis