Though Bruno Dumont recycles his typical themes and motifs, Flanders is also just as beautifully shot and convincingly acted as the director's previous movies.
Though Bruno Dumont recycles his typical themes and motifs, Flanders is also just as beautifully shot and convincingly acted as the director's previous movies.
A man's reluctance to express his emotions has unfortunate consequences in both love and war in this drama from filmmaker Bruno Dumont. Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) is a pretty young woman living in a small village in rural France. Barbe loves Andre (Samuel Boidin), a rough-hewn farmhand who doesn't say much and isn't comfortable sharing his feelings for her in any way other than sex. Frustrated by Andre's inability to show affection, Barbe vents her anger by sleeping with other men, and when Andre
is drafted into the Army, he finds Barbe is saying goodbye to another of her lovers, Blondel (Henri Cretel), at the same time she's saying farewell to him. Andre and Blondel find themselves serving in the same outfit as they're sent to an unnamed Middle Eastern nation, where the grim circumstances of war wears away their humanity as they rape and murder civilians. Meanwhile at home, Barbe discovers she's pregnant with Blondel's child, and begins experiencing a nervous breakdown. Flanders received its world premier at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.
The harsh and lovely achievement of Bruno Dumont's Flanders is its mixture of the concrete and the abstract. It isn't about a specific war. It's about conflict of every stripe, in any time.
French filmmaker Bruno Dumont urges his audience to delve beneath the movie's melodramatic, often graphic surface and experience the film sensorially rather than intellectually.
This is not a film of youth or wisdom -- it's not even a film of real intelligence. And so we flit between war and relative peace, with no insight or feeling or compelling style.
Dumont's gift for dramatic expression of physical space and sensuously conceived landscape is undeniable. If only he had attached a coherent story to his vividly evoked sense of surroundings.
Anything but comforting. With its depiction of bestial behavior and shocking wartime violence, it's the kind of film that polarizes viewers through the raw power of its imagery.
Among his other deficiencies, Dumont is ... utterly humorless. ... Flanders will leave you nostalgic for the wacky hijinx of films like Persona and The Passion of the Christ.
Flanders is relentlessly bleak, but as it works its way into your bloodstream, the aftertaste is somewhat akin to relief...For those who allow it, Flanders offers the comfort of recognition, and acceptance, of what it means to be human.
His camera, whether focused upon acts of horrific brutality or humdrum routine, maintains a steady, unflinching gaze. This, it seems to say, is life and death and nothing else.
An awfully slow French movie with minimalistic dialogue that adds nothing to the war-movie genre. If you really must see it, at least skip the first half-hour!
Raw treatment of sex and death where little is said and shots last forever in typical french style. It improves when it moves to the theatre of war but it didn't have anything new to say particularly.
No quotes approved yet for Flanders (Flandres). Logged in users can submit quotes.
Submit a Quote from 'Flanders (Flandres)'
A quote can be a single line from one character or a memorable dialog between several characters. Please make your quotes accurate. Quotes will be submitted for approval by the RT staff.
Example:
Luke: Alright. I'll give it a try. Yoda: No. Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.
Top Critic
