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Flanders review
:. Director: Bruno Dumont
:. Starring: Samuel Boidin, Adélaïde Leroux
:. Running Time: 1:31
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: France
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With Bruno Dumont, everything starts with the landscape. Visceral, it vibrates in rhythm with the movement of the bodies, in which the sensitive reflects the interior climate of the character. Reaffirmed in the title, this territory defines clear dramaturgy. The film mirrors two spaces with climates that are worlds apart: the cinegenic region of Flanders and an Eastern country suffocating from the heat. Dumont's camera brush sensitively draws the contours of these moving landscapes. With one, a pallet saturated with gray, the other with the sun, and everything ends in a blaze of glory. It's through the territory that the characters come alive, as Dumont recalls, "I need the earth to film human beings. By filming them, Flanders is rendered a part of human existence ".
Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) paces through the countryside each day with the farmer Démester (Samuel Boidin), her childhood friend with whom she shares a physical relationship. The fragile young woman also gives herself dispassionately to Blondel. The two boys leave for the war where they confront horror. Barbe suffers from a nervous breakdown in their absence. Démester returns alone from a war from which Barbe knows everything, having suffered greatly for it. Dumont had already exiled himself in foreign territories, the resonating substance of a cinema in love with photography. It was 29 Palms, a friction about American stereotypes. Dumont hollowed out the sign, like his shots, in a radical approach where he revisited cinematographic mythology.
Again, the director relocates his cinema in an indefinite place (maybe Iraq). The war, such as he represents it, becomes as abstract as the territory in which it happens. It is not so much the war which matters as the idea of its effects on human beings, as shown in two segments which alternate, answer each other and knock together. The parallel montage produces true disorder. Paradoxically, in its split Flanders finds a sick harmony. The successful project is tended from beginning to end by a fever and a beauty in all of the shots. The nonprofessional actors are obviously there for many of them. And particularly Adelaide Leroux, all diaphanous grace and sunken violence. One has the feeling of having had a great meeting. The actress is quite simply immense in her momentum and her silence. Unforgettable even, in the style of Bresson's heroines in which she is the heiress incarnate. Until then, concerned with mysticism, Dumont had the annoying tendency to make icons of his actors. The actress escapes this weakness and expresses a new sensuality in Dumont's work.
This is not the only sign of revival that one observes, dazzled, in what appears to be the director's best film. The sex is filmed in a detached way. Dispassionate, certainly, but not crude either. And when the two heroes confess their love, their words appear much more daring than their bodies. Whether it's about war or sex, the stakes are the same: two parties fighting over a territory to be conquered. The mise en scene notes this report in a burning film which leaves us with a taste of Flanders in our mouth.
Sandrine Marques
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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