Flanders (2006) User Reviews

Genuinely challenging, let down by a slight lack of coherence

[paperbackboy · 7/10 · 10 October 2013]

It's clear from other reviews that more or less everybody is agreed about the director's rather tricksy film-making and the lack of conventional narrative drive. It's just a question of whether you think these things make for a good film or a bad film.

For me, the good outweighs the bad: the deliberately non-emotional characterization, slow pace, and powerful use of landscape push viewers out of their comfort zone, and force us to confront some pretty basic realities about life and war.

It's the parallels - not the contrasts - between home life and the war that are most interesting. On many occasions, the film seems to have a deliberately timeless, ahistorical feel, so that the characters feel tremendously elemental (the word medieval springs to mind too) in their behaviours and concerns. Despite a slight lack of coherence (not necessarily in the plot, more in the overall conception), we do genuinely somehow care for the characters - quite an achievement given the overall tone of the movie.

The use of Flanders as the setting and title reinforces this sense of historical continuity, of war recurring down through the ages - not for nothing is the region known as "the cockpit of Europe". And by the way, a big chunk of historical Flanders is now in France (the French-plated cars, with "59" indicating the North department which includes most of French Flanders, are a giveaway). French Flanders is by definition not in Belgium, as one reviewer has suggested. However, one of the female characters (Barbe's friend) appears to have a strong Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking) accent - a nice touch, and not entirely implausible in this border region, where a few people still speak Flemish on the French side of the border (visit Hondschoote, and you'll see what I mean).

This film should make everybody rethink their approach to war, and the impact of sending young men (and women, although not in this film) from more or less every generation off to fight and die (remember that Flanders was scarred by war twice in a lifetime in the 20th century). Not necessarily a particularly easy watch on the face of it, but a powerful and worthwhile one.

minimalistic style used on an unexpected theme

[dromasca · 7/10 · 14 September 2007]

What is surprising in this film is the way the director uses a very simple minimalistic style of telling a story to cope with one of the most important themes of the contemporary world - the involvement of the young people in Western countries in wars that happen in the third world. This is the story of two young men from some rural place in Northern France or French speaking Belgium who are sexually involved with the same girl before being sent to fight a war in a remote Islamic country. The girl has her own mental problems and has an abortion while the young men face all possible horrors of war, face death, commit and are subjected to unimaginable violence. All is told in very simple, well filmed and clear images, and this creates a strong emotional impact. With simple cinematographic tools the director sends a message of distress and pain about the conflicts human beings are subjected to in the world today. Worth watching.

War is hell, men are pigs

[roy-blake · 6/10 · 21 September 2006]

Flandres won the grand prize at Cannes, so somebody must have liked it. I didn't, much. The film takes a depressed, and depressing, look at the life of a French peasant, who becomes a soldier in a nameless war somewhere in the Mideast. At the beginning of the movie, we see him doing farm chores, wandering around the muddy barnyard with a pig (a heavy-handed metaphor Eisenstein would have loved), and having Hobbesian sex with his girlfriend (nasty, brutish and short, possibly the least erotic scene of consensual sex ever filmed.) Later he denies that they are a couple, so she takes revenge by immediately going off with another man. Good for her, and too bad she can't stay away from this brute.

Both of the heroine's lovers are drafted and sent to some faraway desert land where they join a small platoon. The men know nothing about the war, and seem to care less. They fight when they have to, and some of them, including our hero, rape a lone woman when they get the chance. The woman turns out to be a rebel officer, and when the men are captured she has one of them castrated and shot. He turns out not to be one of the men who raped her. No justice here, just chance and random cruelty --- we get the point.

Our hero eventually escapes, after leaving the girl's other lover, who is wounded, to be killed by the rebels. (Not that any heroism on his part would have helped, they would merely both have been killed.) He has been moved enough by his experience to mutter "I love you" as they have sex again. This time the sex is just as boorish, but the sun is shining and the girl has an air of resignation rather than frustration.

The film is well made in a minimalist sort of way, for which its director has been much praised. However, I felt that the points have been made before, and more effectively. I also thought I detected a whiff of condescension, the Paris intellectual looking down his fine long nose at the dirty peasants and their humdrum lives devoid of any real consciousness. I don't, personally, think that's fair.

Popularity Contest

[tiarings · 1 March 2007]

It's remarkable that this film is not more popular. It successfully strips away the veneer of "civilisation" (false morality, good manners etc) and shows people as selfish, brutal animals, and depicts modern, asymmetrical warfare as a terrible nightmare where a group of brutish white thugs rape and murder a terrified, technologically backward society (nearly all of whom are defenceless/ poorly armed women and children) before finally being made to suffer a grim but deserved humiliation for their actions. Oh, actually, what am I saying? It'll be a bloody surprise if it ever comes out in North America properly, given the hypocritical, righteous atmosphere of self-delusion that currently permeates this society, a society underpinned by exactly the kind of abuse and violence that this film describes.

Stark and unflinching drama covering unglamorous living; the horrors of war and the gradual nullifying of the human spirit.

[johnnyboyz · 7/10 · 28 April 2013]

Flandres is a depiction of what happens when simple people are placed into complicated situations; it is a quite shocking, although stirring, war-set drama which is more about the tragedy of how human beings can slump to the depths we're able than it is about the tragedy of war itself. The folk in the film are unassuming, uncreative and with little to say nor do during their days in an undetermined, mostly rural, French speaking nation; the sorts of scenarios they eventually come to find themselves in are very much the opposite – the film playing out like a perverse circus of what happens when a test gerbil is placed in an environment it has little-to-no-hope of conquering, and all for our viewing displeasure as we sit back and witness the experiment.

People in Flandres make love without emotion; they live life without empathy; and find it difficult to react to levels of deplorable violence. It is to this extent that Bruno Dumont's film is more a burning, nihilistic drama than a war film per se; a film that weeps for mankind, a film depicting a desensitisation that the species has for love; violence; fellow man and attitudes towards life. The film follows a young man named André (Boidin), an ugly man; a simple man, a farmer in the wooded plains of what could be France; what might be Belgium or what might even be somewhere as seemingly disassociated and arbitrary as Luxembourg. Farm life is routine: it snows in the winter and a lot of walking is generally required in a zone cut off from urbanised living. These people, other farmers and the young females living in close proximity, rarely speak with whatever communication required between them done so via glances and meagre actions. Since there is nary an awful lot that needs getting done in the first place, it is all that these people need to amass in their communication in order to get things done. So rarely do things happen in the lives of these people that a crude, seemingly random, sexual relationship between André and young Barbe (Leroux) strikes us as almost illegitimate.

It is on one of these days that one of André's few friends relays to him that he will be going off to war in the near future. In their leaning up against a barn wall, while appearing to systematically stare off into the distance beyond a nearby gate at what's beyond, we sense that this might very well be a jump for this character greater than it might be for others: nary do these people treads beyond into the wider unknown and what has just been spoken of would be a drastic change. Sure enough, Dumont's cut from the ice cold European territory to the flat, arid deserts of this unspecified place engulfed in a war between Europeans and Arabs is the sort of jump in composition that can only emphasise this.

André has clambered aboard in the drafting process, the idea that where they're headed is the unknown and the ambiguity surrounding what the war is for, as well as you might say the specific name of the country, is supposed to encapsulate most of what's going on in the Middle East, as Caucasians from most nations vie with locals in a place of which they've probably not previously heard for surface means of which they think they're aware. Trying to work out where exactly the warzone is acts as a pleasing distraction once all the war-set nastiness kicks off; where the clear inflection is Iraq or Afghanistan, Dumont appears to tie in the jungles of somewhere like North Korea to add to the idea this foreign war might just as well be anywhere. The wartime sequences are as harrowing as any from most war films, while the film itself is often constructed as if not even a war film in the first place but some sort of survival horror piece wherein folk have wondered into a Hellish bloodbath where one can only (how did Mr. Blonde put it in Reservoir Dogs?) "Pray for a quick death you aren't going to get".

Dumont doffs his cap to the likes of Full Metal Jacket with a sequence involving a sniper, a confrontation which eventually leads onto the encountering of a child soldier and the nastiness which comes with that. His greatest achievement, however, is how he constructs this idea of life on the homestead and life at war being more intrinsically linked than one might think - principally, the merciless disregard for young life in the executing of these child soldiers as well as the domestic termination of an unborn as well as the desire to instigate casual sexual intercourse with the women of where one happens to find one's self. This whole idea of white Western men, few of whom are bright in the first place, arriving on the shores of what is otherwise a stark change in climate and way of life in the form of a foreign country, before instigating their attitudes and ways of life upon what's around them, also feels apparent if not the primary focus. With a steady eye for agonised detail, Flandres is the painful piece of cinema I wasn't expecting heading in – its topical nature combined with its grizzled aesthetic demonstrates a real talent at work while the experience as a whole stays with you for some considerable time, all of which adds up to something worth tracking down.

a poet tells a story of the most important kind

[matt-szy · 9/10 · 2 August 2006]

Bruno Dumont does not like expressions on people faces. The characters in his films do not act with facial expressions. Instead they move and talk and look around like any real live person might do except with no emotion. This is called minimalism. Dumont directs his actors to portray as minimal emotion, reaction, sensation as possible. This does not mean he does not take the face into consideration. No, no. It is in the face that we can see the person, what they have been through, how much they might have suffered, experienced, etc. In fact, Dumont chooses faces well. And what Dumont does better than choose the faces of his actors is he creates a sense of emotions, internal confusion, and unguided motivation in a world that exists solely between the boundaries of our vision and the outermost layer of our eyes. We see this in Flandres.

What could and usually is, in cinema, a way to convey emotions is by framing facial expressions which usually follow or/and precede dialogue. Dumont simplifies this process and leaves any emotional identification more up to interpretation, and consequently having us rely on our own feelings as viewers to understand the characters depth rather than understanding the characters feelings – for as it seems, for Dumont, feelings are a rather difficult thing to express.

Dumont does this by montage. The main character, Demester, a weird but thoughtful looking guy, is with the girl he does not call his girlfriend, Barbe, on the day before he leaves to war. They are sitting before a bonfire in the French country side during winter. They are met by the guy who the Barbe recently met at a bar, Blondel, a pretty looking boy. Barbe and Blondel have sex right away in the parking lot. Demester watches this happen but does not react. Both Blondel and Demester are going to war and will be in the same brigade. Barbe is sitting between them. They simultaneously lay back in the grass. Barbe takes turns kissing them, leaning from one side to Demester then to Blondel, telling them how much she will miss them both. Demester sits up. He stares off in the distance, detached from the situation. After seeing his blank face for a while we cut to a silhouette of a tree in the distance with the flat and frozen winter country in the background. The tree has no leaves, it's branches reach out wildly in all directions. A few moments pass. And cut.

Sex in Dumont's films is often brutal and sad, and is always short. The girls never appear to get pleasure out of sex and the guy is always mechanical and numb. Demester and Barbe walk silently for some time to an isolated grassy area where they do not kiss, Barbe only pulls down her pants and says, "do you want me?" at which point Demester gets on top of Barbe. It is as though the characters in Dumont's films are simplified to their basic animal needs and that sex is the only means to some deeper connection. In "The Life of Jesus" the main boy and his girl are often in the background of a scene kissing at a slugs pace with no elevation of excitement, receiving no reaction from friends nearby, frozen in a suction like mouth to mouth. Likewise, in a scene in "Humanity" sex is shot from a wide angle in a long take revealing the banality of the act.

Shots of repetitive motions often last for awkwardly moments. As Demester is plowing though a field – he is a farmhand – with a tractor a close up of the blades slicing through mud and dirt underline the mere ugliness and mechanical repetitive nature of things. Shots and repetition like this persist in all Dumont's films. In "The Life of Jesus" it is the sight and sounds of the Scooters, the monotone kissing of the young couple, and in "Humanity," it is the legs of a man riding a bike, among others, which the viewer is forced to watch obsessively.

Above all Dumont is a moralist, however subtle. He shows us the thoughtlessness of our actions. Flandres is, in short, about a guy who does not know if he loves a girl. He leaves to war, and there he rapes, kills, witnesses killing, leaves behind a fellow soldier in order to save himself, gets lost, and is himself nearly killed in a few situations. His life is spared not by any of his good deeds, for there are few, instead his life is spared by none other than blind luck. He is not special. He is just lucky. And after having returned home to his little simple life in the French countryside, unable to verbalize this experiences to Barbe, the only words he is able to conjure up, after some difficulty, is I love you.

Expressionistic and poetic

[howard.schumann · 9/10 · 21 January 2008]

Whether you like the films of Bruno Dumont or not, one thing is certain - you never forget them. Films such as La Vie de Jesus and L'Humanité have an elemental power that challenge us to confront the sickness of the soul that comes from denying our capacity to be and act human. Dumont's latest film Flanders, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2006, has the same acute powers of observation, slow and careful revelation of character, and insight into the human condition that characterized his first two films. Like La Vie de Jesus, Flanders is a film that deals with sexual and racial tension and marginal young people whose lives mirror the emptiness of the rural countryside in which the film is set.

The first two words of the film are the "f" word and the "s" word, which set the tone for what is to follow. Demester (Samuel Boidin), a burly local works on a farm and is having a passionless relationship with Barbe (Adélaide Leroux), a girl from a neighboring farm. True to Dumont's oeuvre, sex is joyless and mechanical and neither partner expresses affection. There is little dialogue and no musical score, only sounds of nature, the clumping of boots through the forest, and the grunting and pumping that suggest the sex act. The expressions on the faces of the characters are as vacant as the surrounding countryside and no director in the world can better convey a sense of pervasive emptiness than Bruno Dumont.

At a local pub, Demester matter-of-factly denies that he and Barbe are a couple, prompting Barbe to react by going off with a stranger, Blondel (Henri Cretel) to have sex and it soon becomes apparent that she has a reputation in the village for promiscuity. Demester and Blondel's fate will intertwine however. Both are in the same regiment called up to fight an unnamed war in a distant country that looks like the North Africa of Claire Denis'Beau Travail. It is not clear if the fighting is meant to reflect the War in Iraq, the French adventure in Algeria, or perhaps a European war yet to be fought. When the soldiers arrive they walk through a trench, possibly a vision of World War I in Flanders field, immortalized in the poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.

Dumont shows us war in its ultimate depravity including rape, murder of children, castration, and other brutalities. It is as if years of the soldier's sexual tensions and lack of emotional connection has exploded in a callous way, reflective of the torture of Iraqi's at Abu Ghraib. As his buddies die one by one at the hands of dark-skinned guerilla fighters, it becomes obvious that Demester will not lift a finger to save or protect them, a witness to his inability to access what FDR used to call, "that quiet, invisible thing called conscience". As the guerilla fighting in the streets and houses intensify, there is a war going on at home also. Barbe becomes pregnant and has a mental breakdown that lands her in a psychiatric hospital. Soon the war will be fought on two fronts.

Flanders has been called an anti-war film but the war seems to take place mostly on an internal level. It is expressionistic and poetic, a film that unfolds as if in a dreamscape that has no past, present, or future. You cannot appreciate Flanders by thinking about it, but only by feeling it, viscerally, in your blood. After showing mankind at its most vile in order to, in the director's own words, "relieve us of those urges", Dumont grants us a catharsis. Like unemployed, uneducated, and epileptic 20-year old Freddy in La Vie de Jesus whose vision of the sun after a brutal murder heralded an awakening, in his barn after the war's end, Demester recognizes the truth of the gaping wounds in his own soul and opens himself to the possibility of grace.

Once more with feeling!

[prometheus-dk · 2/10 · 10 March 2007]

Truly one of the worst films, I have ever had the intense displeasure of watching. Bruno Dumont and his hyper-minimalist style is an affront to anyone who takes film seriously. What he does is to remove everything that makes cinema work: acting, dialogue, music, editing, visual language. He reduces, what I think could be an engaging story, to a pseudo-documentarist look at characters that I ultimately don't give a sh** about! You see, that's what happens when you refuse to use any of the tools of the trade to form a connection with your audience; you don't get one. In the rape scene, where Demester and his friends come upon an Arab girl and gang-rape her, I didn't feel anything. When Demester leaves his friend to die, i didn't feel anything. And when Demester returns home and tells his (for lack of a better word) girlfriend that he loves her, I didn't feel anything. That's what I took away from the film: Nothing, except of course the overwhelming feeling of having wasted an hour and a half of my life that I will never get back. I won't deny, that Dumont has an eye for images. His montage-technique is quite good (although his belief that it can carry an entire movie is preposterous to say the very least). Especially the first ten minutes of the film demonstrate this. However because it never moves beyond that, I can never quite bring myself to care about what happens to the characters. If you like minimalism (which I'm not opposed to by principle), I suggest to check out film by Carlos Reygadas or some of the Italian masters. At least save yourself having to sit through 90 minutes of some pseudo-intellectuals director's formalistic experiments. Shun it! Shun it as you would a rabid dog.

Powerful return to form for Dumont

[Chris Knipp · 9/10 · 5 December 2006]

In a way, Bruno Dumont's Flandres is no more realistic than Cuarón's Children of Men. It doesn't exactly seek to depict real people or a real war. Dumont's people are laconic, but the powerful film-making tells a clear and moving story. Using simple, economical means and focusing on a few individuals, presenting scenes that follow a logical, universal progression, Flandres is able to tell a profound story about war's ravages at home and on the front. Dumont's storytelling is simple and sure. So is the cinematography of Yves Cape and the editing of Guy Lacorne. And so is the acting, especially of Samuel Boidin as Démester and of Adélaïde Leroux as his girlfriend Barbe -- but also of Henri Cretel as Démester's friend Blondel, and of Jean-Marie Bruveart (Briche), David Poulain (Leclercq), Patirce Venant (Mordac), David Legay ( (Lieutenant) and Inge Decaesteker (France).

The film focuses on a young farmer and his girlfriend. He and some other locals are going off to war. Last sex, last drinks with friends, last campfire gatherings, last work in the field with a tractor.

Then, the departure: roll call, near a truck, a few people waving goodbye. Next Démester is in the desert. In an attempt to take a building (a scene we know well through documentary news footage from Iraq) one of their officers is blown up. A helicopter takes away the body. They enter the building and kill a couple of youthful partisans -- fighters, clearly, but also mere pitiful boys.

Each of the scenes is iconic and vivid. This is low-budget war, but it feels real enough. How big is the budget of a few men fighting out in the bush? There are tanks and explosions aplenty. Most of all there is sweat and dust and blood. Two other things happen. The squad captures a woman fighter, and some of the men rape her. Later, on a hillside, they trap a farmer on a donkey loaded with firewood, and they shoot him. They are subsequently captured by members of the enemy (who are North African--but their dialogue isn't translated; and they could be Iraqis) who know what they have done, and they are severely punished.

Meanwhile André's (Démester's) girlfriend Barbe at home grows more and more unstable and after a violent psychotic break, she is hospitalized, but later released.

André escapes with his friend Blondel, but when Blondel's shot, he runs off to save himself.

Dumont uses the inarticulate country talk of the people to underline the universality of the events. How did Blondel die, his girlfriend wants to know later? "Balle dans la tête," Démester says; a bullet in the head. That's all he wants to say, and all we need to know. Démester is a brute, in a way. But he's also got a sweet smile. He's childlike. He is the child sent off to kill that all war builds upon.

Next we see Démester back home. The final sequences convey how damaged he and his girlfriend and his friend's girlfriend are now. André suffers from survivor guilt. Their state is pitiful, but the last shot is positive. André is lying on the dirt with Barbe and telling her over and over "Je t'aime...je t'aime." I love you.

This is classic Dumont style, if on a bolder and grander scale than before. His people are none the less noble, pathetic, and human for being reduced to simplicity, even crudity. Dumont has told a story as energetic and forward-driven as the Dardennes brothers' L'Infant, but more universal, and even more concise (91 rather than 100 minutes). As in Dumont's L'Humanité and La Vie de Jésus, there's a grandeur that emerges from the stripped-down, minimal scenes and people. Everything works. It's surprising that Variety's usually canny reviewer made it sound dull and off-putting. There is still resistance to Dumont's style.

Unsatisfactory, poorly executed drama

[rasecz · 4/10 · 30 September 2007]

The story of a nymphomaniac and three of her friends who go to war. They live in a rural area and the young men are farmhands.

Weak dramatic construction and execution makes this an unsatisfactory narrative. One could put a positive spin by stressing the contrast made between the muddy, limited and mundane life of the farm with the dirty and savage moments of war zones. One could also call attention to the parallels between the minor moral transgressions of civilian life and the moral outrages perpetrated by combatants during an armed conflict. But even this alternative viewing superimposes itself poorly on the narrative structure.

Antidote to the Romantic View of War (and Humanity)

[binaryg · 9/10 · 20 April 2008]

I'm not sure how "Flanders" came to my attention but I am certainly glad that I had the opportunity to see it and I intend to seek out more of director Dumont's work. The film takes a cold hard look at nature of humanity, love, and war. The work of Bresson and his effective use of non-professional actors came to mind for me.

War is brutal. People are capable of doing very bad things in the name of love and war as this film so well demonstrates. I was disgusted by "Blackhawk Down" when it was released to feed the blood lust in the run up to the war in Iraq. I found Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" dishonest. The pro war message of that film was much stronger than any anti war theme it presented. If the old and wealthy had to fight wars instead of the young there would be a hell of a lot fewer wars.

Dumont's view of humanity is not very positive nor is his view of war. People are not very caring and are capable of evil. Sending people to kill others is not a glorious thing. I'm tired of being told "war is hell" and that things like the killing of women and children and the torture and killing of POWs is the cost of doing war and has always been done.

The characters in "Flanders" seem appropriately dead to their own existence and that of others. Dumont's visuals add to the sense of a brutal, inhospitable world. His is an effective and affectless view of the world as I experience it as a kind of a horror show. I recently heard a statistic that in addition to the 54,000 soldiers we lost in combat in Vietnam 200,000 veterans have committed suicide. I'm not sure how accurate that is but the stories I am hearing about the physical, psychological, and mental trauma to the troops returning from Iraq makes war seem a luxury humankind cannot afford. I am grateful that for this work by Bruno Dumont. It is not an easy film to watch but it is, I think, an important one.

Another Dark Night Of The Soul From Bruno Dumont

[Seamus2829 · 9/10 · 2 September 2007]

Bruno Dumont seems to have an obsession for depicting his fellow French citizens in some pretty dark & dismal situations. Thankfully, this makes for some edgy,concise drama. Although I walked away major disappointed with the last film of his I saw (The Twenty Nine Palms), this made up for it in spades. The plot concerns the tentative relation ship between a farm hand (Samuel Boidin),and the local town slut (Adelaide Leroux),who's screwing everybody in the local phone book. Andre has been called to the Army to fight in a war in a non specific area (Iraq?). Andre soon finds out about the hell that is war,while Barbe deals with her own demons. If you've ever seen any of Dumont's other films will know that he doesn't make things easy for his audiences (sex that is depicted in his films is generally unerotic,if not downright ugly to watch,plus violence is never approached with restraint). If you've managed to make it this far, 'Flandres',although unpleasant to watch,is none the less,a film well worth checking out.

Another Lighthearted Fable From Bruno Dumont

[liehtzu · 1 November 2006]

Pusan Film Festival Reviews 3: Flanders (Bruno Dumont) Dumont provides the downer of the festival, as three rural farm fellows sign up to go to war in an unnamed Muslim country. Back at home the town slut pines over the two she was having sex with, and eventually has a mental breakdown. Thousands of miles away the boys find their squad decimated and the survivors drifting around the desert, raping local women, looting, and shooting kids. It all makes one wonder what Dumont is getting at - the director has a background in philosophy but chooses to center his films on inarticulate neanderthal types, but to illustrate what? The film is certainly powerful, and Dumont can pull a great tour de force, but there's a deep strain of nihilism that runs through each of his films that I find distasteful. The director draws parallels between life on the farm, where a couple of the lads have a turn rutting the pretty local girl who unflinchingly gives herself to them, and their war outpost, where they drag a woman out of her house and take turns with her in a kind of redneck hoo-rah. But Dumont is almost comically lacking in any kind of warmth, good graces, or humor, and his relentlessly bleak view of an animalistic humanity gets to be too much. At least "The Optimists" made me laugh.

A tedious movie

[pdee-1 · 3/10 · 21 November 2008]

I gather French movie makers receive subsidies to produce French language movies - is this true ?

It would help to explain the number of tedious pot boiling French movies. There is little commercial incentive - just put something together and collect the check from the government ?

I am always suspicious of movies where and when people just aimlessly wander around or indulge in desultory conversation (if it could be called conversation) They tried to insert some action into the film - not very convincing. A military expert would come down hard on troops herding together in a gaggle under fire instead of dispersing. And a helicopter landing directly into an area under small arms and grenade/mortar fire ?(and getting away without coming under fire! Lucky guys! )

Darker than most

[stensson · 8/10 · 27 May 2007]

In a grey and uncharming part of France, these farming people live. Life is quiet. You start a relation with the girl in the neighbor house. Life would have remained quiet if it wasn't for war. Or...? There's a shocking contrast here, between the silent life and the brutal battles in Africa. It directly affects also life at home, in an almost as brutal way. Can the things we've done, those wounds, be healed? Maybe they can after all.

A very tense drama, which is sometimes hard to watch. Well acted, and very far from mainstream action, especially when it comes to psychological violence.

Pretentious artsy...something, with bad writing, bad direction and bad acting

[not_even_one · 2/10 · 4 March 2007]

No, really. I have no idea how I managed to watch this thing to the end, but the only advice I can give you is: by all means, do not waste an hour and a half of your life watching this. I seriously don't know where to start with what's wrong with this title, maybe because there's nothing really right about it, save for one single subplot set...in a war, either in Afghanistan or Iraq (see, we don't know which war it is), involving Belgian soldiers and a female enemy combatant. Otherwise this 'movie' is a mess of randomly thrown in characters (you'll find yourself thinking 'who the hell is this?' all the time if you gather enough courage to watch the movie), pretentious artsy directing (close-up of a face followed by a wide angle shot of the landscape...throughout the WHOLE movie), a practically non-existing plot (there's three changes of settings, neither of which makes sense because we never learn anything about the characters or their motivations, or their personal stories), practically non-existing dialogs, or communication for that matter that I guess was meant to be part of Dumont's vision but just adds up to a big pile of nonsense (yeah...there's a whole lot of staring-thoughtfully-into-the-distant landscape in Flanders, especially at the scene where they're hanging out in the field). Now from a technical point of view, whoever recorded and mixed the sound probably won't find another production to work on in the next 20 years. Also, I thought about it real hard, but I couldn't come up with a rational explanation as to why the producers thought it would be a good idea not to have ANY music in this film. Especially given the fact that there's a huge gap created by the severe lack of dialog in there. Moreover...since when do Flemish people speak French? This would cause a riot in Flanders. And how is it that a bunch of soldiers are left on their own in Iraq/Afghanistan, without any supervision or contact with their base and/or commanders? Where are the PEOPLE? Military operations are conducted in strategic spots (e.g. populated areas)...so why do we have one bad guy popping randomly out of nowhere every once in a while? And the military using horses alongside tanks and Hummers? You can't be serious. Apparently, Dumont wanted to depict an ultra-realistic image of humanity, but realism does not equal incoherence.

Do not waste your time on this.

Dumont's "Band of Cains"

[mfd1213 · 3 December 2007]

Bruno Dumont seems to create controversy in every one of his films, but I've only seen "Flandres" and "L'Humanite. " Dumont's film language is very bleak and very stark. He uses little to no soundtrack music, letting ambient sound to substitute. His characters seem to writhe in a painfully prosaic film world, their experiences and torments more vivid for the lack of melodrama.

Demeste (Samuel Boidin) and Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) have a complicated romantic relationship in a rural farming village somewhere in Francophone Europe. Barbe is promiscuous with other men, yet Demeste seems to permit the trysts without comment. You only see his brooding glares. All the young men in the area enlist to go off for war somewhere in an Arab desert. They young soldiers take their emotional baggage with them into this hostile environment. There are fistfights in the camp, firefights in the field, and no one understands the language or mannerisms of the locals. Inevitably, acts of war become acts of war crimes. Seemly normal guys go off to war and become brutal Neanderthals murdering, molesting and bailing. The survivors, like all survivors, are left to try and understand what happened and what they've become.

By turns harrowing and pitiful

[paulscofield68 · 8/10 · 5 October 2006]

Bruno Dumont is back in form here with his fourth release (I found the plot of his previous "Twentynine Palms" to be flawed). Any of you who saw 'The Life of Jesus'('97) and/or 'Humanity'('99) can expect much of the same in terms of style; and to a certain extent, themes as well. This is by no means an easy film to watch (the war scenes, shot in Tunisia, are, at times, just dreadful). And even the storyline which takes place in Flandres, in the north of France (where Dumont is from, and his first two films are set), is full of emotional pain. A very French film, but not of the condescending, intellectual sort, but rather of the realistic, naturalistic, and yes, minimalistic variety. To be seen on the big screen for full effect.

Packs a veritable punch

[missingtth · 9/10 · 13 March 2008]

It's funny: a previous entry suggests a turn to Carlos Reygadas (over Dumont); the fact is that Reygadas is obviously borrowing from Dumont in his latest Silent Night. Make no mistake though, Dumont IS the original.

There isn't a more progressive, uncompromising, audacious filmmaker working in the world of cinema today. And you should be very cautious when you run into someone who puts down his work so angrily. These people have serious political motivations in criticizing Dumont's approach, just like I have serious political motivations in defending him. But if you don't see the humanist tone to his films and you're only aware of the misery and depredation, then you're not looking at the film properly or you have very little humanism in you to begin with.

I know that might sound harsh, but it must be stated, frankly.

I know for sure that Dumont's work gives a lot of hope to socially responsible artists and filmmakers. In the end he's just picking up on a legacy of bold, realistic film-making that was abandoned by the Americans in the seventies (read: What ever happened to the progressive independent American Cinema?).

See all his films open minded, and your world view will be challenged in a way that it hasn't before.

Elegant direction but warped, original screenplays

[JuguAbraham · 5/10 · 19 March 2023]

Bruno Dumont has a good command of elegant filmmaking ("Humanite" and the early parts of "Flanders" are testimonies of this fact). However, I find his extremely twisted screenplays to drive home his view of life disconcerting. In "Flanders," it is French male soldiers (who are deprived of sex for a while) raping a female enemy soldier on battle lines and events that follow, which are related to that incident. Can Dumont write a screenplay devoid of sex, rape, killings, and their aftermath? In "France" (2022), he showed that he could. I have seen four of Dumont's films and they seem to be variants of the same theme in different locales and circumstances. I look forward to future Dumont films that are more like like "Humanite" and "France."

A test of endurance

[Gordon-11 · 12 October 2007]

This film is about a group of young men going off to war. In this far away land, they leave marks to themselves and to the enemies by their lack of morality.

I guess I have to be in a certain mood to enjoy this film. It is highly minimalistic, as it has no soundtrack or extravagant sets. The pacing is extremely slow. It basically features people walking around half the time (and I am very serious), with occasional highly disturbing scenes interspersed in the second half of the film. There is very little dialog in it, and many dramatic scenes are very minimally delivered. For example, the helicopter rescue scene, it could have been made a real drama and thriller but it was so minimal. Flandres could have been a moving tale of morality, but instead tested my endurance.

These Boots are Made For Walking

[tieman64 · 23 April 2011]

"Perhaps when we were raping her we looked at her as a woman. But when we killed her, we just thought of her as a pig." - Unknown Soldier

Bruno Dumont preaches to the converted with "Flanders", a film which merges Brian De Palma's "Casualties of War" with Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket".

The film's first act takes place in a monotonous world of rural villages and lifeless arable land. Using static shots, Dumont spotlights various listless, expressionless characters. Significantly, when energy is expended, it is only to have sex. Dumont's cast resemble livestock as they copulate in the mud.

Like Kubrick and De Palma, conflict stems first from the phallus. Here, a Belgian farmhand called Andre has sex with a local girl called Barbe. It's a pathetic act, a moment where animal drives and emotions confusingly conflate. Afterwards, they're left unfulfilled, the social and biochemical allure of sex giving way to something more banal. It is only when Barbe sleeps with another man in her village that Andre reassess his relationship with her. We don't yet realise it, but revenge fantasies and feelings of psycho-sexual humiliation are bubbling in Andre's head. Now aware that Barbe is desired by others, and that he has no claim over her, Andre acquires a newfound desire to conquer, dominate and spread his seed.

The film cuts to an unnamed Middle Eastern country, the playground of Andre's psyche. Here he witnesses men killing children and soldier's forcing themselves upon a young woman, a scene which echoes not only De Palma's "war as rape" narratives, but Kubrick's symbolic snipers and hookers. Andre then witnesses the raped woman's vengeful response. Back home, Barbe is aborting a baby.

The film's final act is where it breaks free of most war movie conventions. Andre returns from war not traumatised, but with a newfound sense of "humanity". Realizing the dark contours of his desires, his own libidinal drives, Andre sees Barbe for the first time in a new light. Whilst throughout the film everyone views Barbe as a whore, he sees her now as something else. Film's first words: "s**t" and "f**k". Film's last words: "I love you." Like Dumont's "Humanity", "Flanders" paints an exodus away from the corporeal, the bestial, the crude wants of the flesh, and toward what at first seemed like a spiritual impossibility.

The film's title alludes to the killing fields of World War 1, but its imagery conjures up modern images of Iraq, Afghanistan and various American Crusades across Latin America and the Middle East. Scenes in which soldiers travel on horseback evoke the legacies of Western expansion.

Typical of Dumont, the film is a work of extreme minimalism. Every action, gesture, shot, movement and line of dialogue is stripped down to an almost Bressonian essence. Only the "essential" remains. Viewers unwilling to read the film's whispers will find nothing to hold their interest.

Some have said that the film is contemptuous and disgusted by humanity. This is not true. One can argue, however, that Dumont, like most New French Extremists, hates his medium. That he holds the belief that cinema can convey truths only by first rejecting the medium's aesthetic possibilities and gifts for enchantment. The film's distancing effects thus feel smug and self-congratulatory.

Sexual drives and issues of war-rape tend to be left out of most war films, despite sex being at the core of most violence (as I write this, it has been learnt that hundreds of Sri Lankan women were raped by soldiers during the 2009 Civil War, a fact which the local government subsequently covered up- similar things continue in Iraq). Rape is a form of trans-generational revenge and punishment. It is an extension of misogyny, the genocide mentality, the wish to extinguish the enemy and feelings of nationalistic superiority.

The undermining of the enemy's familial, social and national bonds by humiliating females, by creating life-time scars in women's bodies and minds and by socially stigmatising the enemy, does not only comprise psychological warfare, but is a direct extension of the gun and the phallus. In a patriarchal society each rape symbolises, not only abject defeat, but the impotence of the Other (male or female), now rendered submissive. The term rape is also used to denote the occupation of a territory or a town (e.g. the rape of Nanjing) and has even leaked into the computer gaming vocabulary of children ("raping" opponents).

Feminist explanations of sexual torture stress that men abuse power and engage in games of sexual dominance (humiliating and subjugating women etc) as a means of reinforcing their masculine identities. Under such assumptions, men stripped of civilisational inhibitions reveal their "inner desires" with and during war-raping. This view is supported by the fact that the vast majority of rapists in war are not mentally disturbed. They are 'normal' men, drafted or volunteers.

But while it is true that male sexuality is potentially more aggressive than female sexuality, also in times of peace, one must realise that this aggressiveness is cultivated and intensified through the institutional misogyny of the military establishment (and exploited during racist wars). Under such circumstances, many more men rape, even those who would never consider raping a woman during "normal" times. Here, the responsibility for atrocities lies with leaders, who engender or outright sanction such acts.

"Flanders" is far too esoteric and will alienate those most requiring its message. Dumont fails to capture the sparse spirituality of a Tarkovsky, Bresson or Antonioni, despite channelling such a tone well with "L' Humanité". The film is somewhat derivative of "Full Metal Jacket", a film which better conveys the sheer misogyny of bootcamp (and after), and which better points to the future landscape of wars: a world of humane, clean kills, sexism, murder and racism rationalised away by brainwashed men and women as ethics administered via trigger.

7.9/10 - Worth two viewings.

Garbage

[dickgosinya47 · 29 May 2016]

This movie should be reclassified as a snuff film for misogynists and sociopaths. There are more "sex" scenes in this movie than anything else and the war sequences are nothing but a reflection of the testicular born barbarism that young men display during times of war. The unfortunate truth is that this movie does display the type of behavior the patriotic of our world view as " heroic" and "sacrificial". Those of us that view murdering and raping people trying to survive the onslaught of allied forces as a noble cause will cherish this movie as it aptly depicts the cruel ability of humans to rationalize even the most aberrant and violent behavior. If you're really dying to watch a movie where virtually ever single character is devoid of morality, indulge yourself.