LA VIE DE JESUS By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. 3B Productions Director: Bruno Dumont Writer: Bruno Dumont Cast: David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel, Gevieve Cottreel, Kader Chaatouf, Sebastien Delbaere, Sebastien Bailleul, Samuel Boidin, Steve Smagghe Small towns and suburbs with lots of land may be ideal places for raising little kids, but teenagers and the sticks do not mix well. Just look at Bruno Dumont's slow-paced "La Vie de Jesus," so named because he considers it a sort of passion play, about the suffering of a small group of 20-year- olds in the Flemish town of Baileul in Northern France. They're not really bad boys. When they make racist remarks in the presence of an Arab family they're just playing, though they're too immature to realize the extent to which their razzing is harmful. But they feel compassion and when they make mistakes like dissing members of another ethnic group, well, they feel sorry for it. This is particularly true of one of the gang of young people Michou (Samuel Boidin) who has just lost a brother to AIDS and guards the body of the poor fellow together with his empathetic pals. It is likewise legitimate to feel for the central individual, the unemployed, poorly educated Freddy (David Douche), who expresses genuine sympathy for Michou and who, together with the others, takes the young man out for a day at the beach to help him to mourn. There's quite a difference between the way Hollywood portrays the boredom of small-town lie and the way the French do it. Oliver Stone in "U-Turn" shows the people of the miserable white-trash burg of Superior, Arizona, to be thoroughly off-the-wall, from a conniving, weird-looking and unrecognizable Billy Bob Thornton to the philosophy-spouting blind Indian played by Jon Voight. By contrast, Bruno Dumont's sticks figures are anything but cartoonish: they're the types of people you'd expect to find anywhere: listless, jobless, on the dole, looking for kicks, playing around but with an undercurrent of violence. After introducing us to Freddy's mother, Yvette, (Genvieve Cottreel), who runs a small cafe of the type you'll find throughout European villages, Dumont takes us to a core relationship, that of Freddy and his girlfriend Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), who works as a supermarket checker. With little to do during their spare time but ride around the motor scooter which Freddy's mom bought him, Freddy and Marie spend much of their energy lovemaking. Marie even waits for Freddy in his room, situated next door to Freddy's mom's-- who takes their liaison in a purely matter-of-fact way. Complicating the relationship, Freddy is subject to epileptic fits, which his kind mother helps him to work through as do his friends when he is assaulted by the disease on the road. He is also helped by the local hospital which has sophisticated equipment for helping him to cope. The tension begins when Kader (Kader Chaatouf), a young Arab man, hits on Freddy's girl, his advances at first repelled by Marie and later welcomed quite openly. When the fellas take note of these developments, the stage is set for violence. Director Dumont pulls no punches. He is what you might call a Flemish nationalist, in love with the beauty of the northern French landscape and determined to make the hard bodies of his characters serve as metaphor for the silent land. The lovemaking is shown close-up as would the maker of a hardcore porn film: his lovers have no time for foreplay but simply go at it like the simple people they are. Dumont appears to want to convey emotion by closeups of the faces and body language of his people rather than through dialogue, which is spare--quite unusual for a maker of French films which are notably talky. He does not quite succeed in playing off the soil of the region against the torsos of his lead characters but he does get authentic acting from the people, especially from David Douche--not a professional actor but one chosen by the director from a hundred or so candidates from the town of the director's birth. For the most part these young people are going nowhere, get their kicks from games of chicken pitting their motorbikes against the cars passing through, expressing racist remarks that they do not really feel. "Flanders sends shivers up and down my spine," the director recently reported in an interview, but while his movie looks like the genuine article, a portrait of the compassion and hostility of "the boys," "La Vie de Jesus" makes a case neither as a parable for the sufferings of Jesus on the cross nor for 96 minutes of audience quivers and shudders. Not Rated. Running Time: 96 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
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