Flanders (Flandres) (2006)
Average Rating: 6.1/10
Reviews Counted: 57
Fresh: 39 | Rotten: 18
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.
Average Rating: 6.5/10
Critic Reviews: 18
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 4
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.
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Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 2,274
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Movie Info
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
Cast
-
Adelaide Leroux
Barbe -
Samuel Boidin
Demester -
Henri Cretel
Blondel -
Jean-Marie Bruveart
Briche -
David Poulain
Leclercq -
Patrice Venant
Mordac -
David Legay
Lieutenant -
Iain De Caestaecker
France -
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All Critics (58) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (19) | DVD (5)
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.
Top CriticThis film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical.
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.
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.
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.
[A] stilted, affected term-paper treatise on the human condition.
A congealed shrug
Self-important film that presumes it has something pertinent to say about the human condition but doesn't.
Enough is left vague that an abstract quality is achieved, and the effect is one of amplification of the themes running throughout the film.
Sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country.
Dumont's latest sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country.
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.
It's more provocative than realistic and his naturalism is contained in an arch structure, but his directness is affecting ...
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.
Dumont effectively conjures between the dreary routine of everyday life and the normalised horrors of this nameless conflict.
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.
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Foreign Titles
- Flandres (DE)
- Flanders (UK)
