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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.
All Critics (58) | Top Critics (21) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (19) | DVD (3)
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. Jan 3, 2008 | Full Review…
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.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical. Aug 17, 2007 | Rating: 3/4 | Full Review…
This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical.
Roger Ebert
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. Aug 16, 2007 | Rating: 3.5/4
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.
Michael Phillips
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. Aug 3, 2007 | Rating: 3/4 | Full Review…
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.
Jeff Shannon
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. Jul 26, 2007 | Full Review…
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.
Desson Thomson
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. Jul 20, 2007 | Rating: 1.5/4 | Full Review…
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.
Wesley Morris
[A] stilted, affected term-paper treatise on the human condition. Oct 7, 2009 | Rating: C- | Full Review…
[A] stilted, affected term-paper treatise on the human condition.
Nick Schager
A congealed shrug Aug 27, 2009 | Full Review…
A congealed shrug
Fernando F. Croce
Self-important film that presumes it has something pertinent to say about the human condition but doesn't. Feb 3, 2008 | Rating: C | Full Review…
Self-important film that presumes it has something pertinent to say about the human condition but doesn't.
Dennis Schwartz
Enough is left vague that an abstract quality is achieved, and the effect is one of amplification of the themes running throughout the film. Jan 7, 2008 | Rating: 76/100 | Full Review…
Enough is left vague that an abstract quality is achieved, and the effect is one of amplification of the themes running throughout the film.
Jeremy Heilman
Sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country. Nov 14, 2007 | Full Review…
Sexually voyeuristic, low IQ take on the denizens of farm country.
Prairie Miller
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. Aug 4, 2007
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.
[font=Century Gothic]With "Flanders," writer-director Bruno Dumont continues his examination of alienation in an isolated area, back on his home turf of France. Barbe(Adelaide Leroux) is a young woman who is watching the young men of the village go off to war, most of whom she has had sex with(They have sex because they cannot possibly think of anything else to do. Acting out of boredom, it is over as quickly as it begins. No foreplay.), which includes her closest friend, Andre(Samuel Boidin). Of course, this is not the wisest course of action for a woman living in such a small community...[/font] [font=Century Gothic][/font] [font=Century Gothic]War seems a natural topic for Dumont as his movies have gotten progressively more violent. Without war, I do not think these characters' lives would ever change, eternally locked into the same routine. Fighting a largely unseen enemy in an unknown country(I would like to say Iraq but I do not think that is possible under the circumstances), the soldiers display the worst aspects of their personalities which include rage, racism and misogyny.[/font]
Super Reviewer
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!
while I appreciate its experimental approach, the end result doesn't come within a mile of being considered a worthwhile experience.
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.
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