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Twentynine Palms
Directed by Bruno Dumont
Starring: David Wissak, Katia Golubeva
Script: Bruno Dumont
Original Title: Twentynine Palms
Running Time: 1:59
Country: France
Year: 2003
Official Site: Twentynine Palms
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Don't go to see Twentynine Palms expecting a story because, properly speaking, there is none. The most striking aspect about this film is its visual impact and stunning photography.
Screened at the last edition of the Venice film festival, Twentynine Palms is the kind of film you'll either love or hate. A lot of people tend to overlook that this is the latest offering from Bruno Dumont, a filmmaker who has already made quite a stir. His last film, L'Humanité, presented at the Cannes film festival in 1999, was considered scandalous by large numbers present at la Croisette.
Twentynine Palms (the name of a town in the California desert) is a difficult film to relate as there isn't really a story line. The film begins clearly enough. We meet David, an independent photographer and his lover Katia setting out to scout locations in the Joshua Tree region. Over the next couple of hours, we watch the pair wandering around the desert (evoking Antonioni's Zabriskie Point) and witness their bedroom occupations, shopping trips and various other routine activities.
The most striking aspect about this film is its cinematographic beauty. Filmed in scope, Bruno Dumont brings together the different elements of the background, i.e. the setting and landscape into which the characters gradually dissolve. The vast desolation of the desert and intangible expanse of the landscape are unnerving. In art, there have been several schools, some of them revolutionising the history of art. Take the Black Square of Malevitch for example. This work was an absolute breakthrough, revealing how a painting could both be figurative and abstract. Bruno Dumont has also made a film based on abstract, dissociated forms. In fact, look a little closer and you'll see that he does exactly the opposite of what film-making is all about, i.e. filling in an empty space. Bruno Dumont wants to expose this emptiness.
Stripping open space down to a bare minimum and then sampling what remains. How? Using sound. The film is steeped in sound, for example at the swimming pool where we hear the passing by of cars in the background or the whirr of the windmills in the desert; sound dominates the visuals, giving relief to a landscape that offers no comfort for David.
With his latest film, Bruno Dumont has concocted an unusual love story. Despite what we could believe despite some very intense, passionate lovemaking, this relationship is doomed. The feeling of emptiness right at the beginning of the film has definite meaning. He's American, she's Russian and together communicate in French, not always grasping what one another is saying. She doesn't like ice cream, he loves the stuff. She walks everywhere barefoot, whereas he has trouble making love without his shoes on. One of the most visually beautiful scenes in the film shows the couple lying naked next to each other on a rock, head-to-toe. She is totally naked, he has on his shoes; they appear totally unsuited, and even when she takes his penis in her hand, the act of castration is symbolic but insufficient. Another scene near the end of the film will take this symbol even further and incur dramatic consequences of a rare violence.
Bruno Dumont depicts man and his nature (like in his two previous films). He's obsessed by man's behaviour and he's tackled the subject in a more radical manner here. Several scenes represent the bestiality in humans. Take the scene at the swimming pool for example when David approaches his partner like a predator creeping up on his prey or even when he crouches and sifts sand through his hands like a monkey. Bestiality is depicted most explicitly in the scenes when the couple makes love and fight. The groan of sexual pleasure is the same as the groan of agony. Sex and death are clearly linked (a recurring theme in Kubrick's films). The view is harsh and negative but Bruno is not a fan of the human race. His film leaves you cold. It is as if in this empty setting in which everything needs to be created from scratch, Adam and Eve had no other choice but to play a part in their own destruction.
Julien Dufour
Translated into English by Helen Shaw
 Flandres
French Film Reviews
French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present,
Remi Fournier Lanzoni, Continuum Pub Group, 2002.
French DVD Store
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Twentynine Palms movie review
