Review for

HUMANITY (L'Humanite)

 Reviewed by Harvey Karten
 Winstar Films
 Director: Bruno Dumont
 Writer:  Bruno Dumont
 Cast: Emmanuel Schotte, Severine Caneele, Philipe Tullier,
Ghislain Ghesquere, Ginette Allegre

"Humanity" ("L'Humanite") is a film not so difficult to classify as it is simply to sit through. Almost diametrically the opposite of a standard Hollywood creation, "Humanity" puts little emphasis on plot, even less on what we usually think of as beauty, virtually none on music or cinematography or slick, professional acting, and even less on anything resembling clever turns-of-phrases and the like. Bruno Dumont filmed his scenes almost wholly in the small working class, Northern French town of Bailleul--not far from Lille--the stylization =

restricted almost wholly to unusual close-ups of parts of people's bodies. While Dumont paces his story at about the same pace as his countryman, Eric Rohmer, his dialogue is as unlike Rohmer's as it is from Jerry Bruckheimer's. =

So...what's it all about, Alfie? "Humanity" is about nothing less than life and death, sex and violence, pity and tragedy; in short, about what makes us living human beings. Dumont is obviously inspired by the late, great Robert Bresson who expressed himself on film "as a poet would with his pen" (according to Jean Cocteau). Like Bresson he is a philosopher with a camera whose films ("The Life of Jesus" for example) contain only the bare essentials that he wants to explore, and he explores this limited material with a rigorous attention to detail. Even in his display of a series of paintings in the current film, he mimes Bresson in avoiding beautiful images in favor of "necessary" ones, and like Bresson he has no use for skilled, professional actors.

In this long movie that plods ahead like molasses crawling up a tree in January, and with a storyline used as an excuse for some statements about life, Dumont spreads before us a few days in the life of a small-town police officer, Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotte), who has a burning, unrequited lust for a neighbor, Domino (Severine Caneele). Pharaon once had a woman friend and a baby who both died two years earlier and he tags along as a fifth wheel to Domino and her insensitive, bus-driver boy friend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Reacting with horror to the rape-murder of an eleven-year-old girl, Pharaon is so sensitive, so unlike Joseph, that he agonizes with unfiltered emotions to the heinous crime. So visceral is his torment that in the dramatic opening scene, he is caught in close-up by Dumont's photographer, Yves Cape, running along the countryside, huffing and puffing, until he collapses to the ground, hugging the muddy earth as though he were embracing the core of life itself. =

If Pharaon is the essence of sensitivity and Joseph the extract of indifference, Domino is the elixir of earthiness. The large-boned, amateur actress, Severine Caneele, comes across looking faintly transsexual, an earth-mother who gives in boldly and joyously to her sexual urges. Cape's camera hones in as graphically as any in recent years on sexual acts engaged in by Joseph and Domino, showing Domino as a woman who is barely concerned when she is accidentally observed by Pharaon--who has dull-wittedly swung her door open and stands unblinkingly witnessing her performance. In one unforgettable image, the camera closes in on her entire pelvic area, displayed as an adult copy of the same bodily segment shown in closeup of the little dead girl lying in the field.

What rivets us to the screen throughout the extended running time is director Dumont's singular emphasis on life's details, which we observe through Pharaon's eyes. The big, bull neck of the hardworking but barely competent police chief (Ghislain Ghesquere) receives the same attention as a gigantic hog lying in the barn being suckled by a litter of her piglets. Pharaon, used by the director to represent life's humanity, compensates for his dullness of mind by his unusual sensitivity. When an Algerian drug pusher is brought in by the police chief for questioning and left alone in the room with De Winter, Pharaon more than compensates for his intellectual numbness and unblinking expression by his tactile genius. He puts his hand around the prisoner's neck and smells him as would a dog, indicating his empathy with the accused and at the same time representing to us that compassion and kindness lie not in our verbal acumen or quickness of mental alertness but in our more basic, physical mammalian faculties.

What Dumont has succeeded in giving us--or those of us who have the discernment, patience and sitzfleisch to settle in for a look at this director's universe Bressonian universe--is a gaze at the essence of humanity, which reaches us because he does not distract us with anything resembling a Hollywood form. Dumont's picture takes place in a commonplace, vapid town with everyday, insipid people. =

Because of Dumont's minimalism, we are all the more able to perceive the complex passions, jealousies, and struggles to understand what for good and evil makes us all human. This picture, which has divided its audience from the first showing, was the surprise runner-up for top ribbon at the Cannes Film Festival, its two principal theps taking home the top prize for their performances.

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