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With Flanders, winner of the
Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Bruno Dumont
returns to the land of his childhood in northern France to make
what many are calling his most accessible film to date.
André Demester shares his time between his farm and walks
with Barbe, his childhood friend. He loves her secretly and painfully,
accepting from her the little that she can give him. Along with
the others his age, Demester leaves home to be a soldier in a war
in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn Demester
into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away,
waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless
love for Barbe save him?
"There is in Dumont’s world, more
perhaps than for any other filmmaker, a capacity to see the beauty
and human particularity of individuals at the very moment that physical
drive and brutality are brought to bear upon them.”
-Jean-Michel Frodon, Cahiers du Cinema
"Bruno Dumont returns to the form his
admirers love in Flanders a somber, beautifully acted reflection
on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man which only enormous
compassion can redeem.” -- Deborah Young, Variety
"Moving and remarkably contained.”
-- Glenn Kenny, Premiere
"Better than a cross between Irrevérsible
and Saving Private Ryan. A return to form.”
-- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Flanders makes antimilitary and antioccupation
statements with clear parallels to the situation in Iraq. With a
brilliant severity, it is Dumont’s most accomplished work
since La vie de Jésus.” -- Howard Feinstein,
Filmmaker Magazine
"There is in Dumont’s world, more
perhaps than for any other filmmaker, a capacity to see the beauty
and human particularity of individuals at the very moment that physical
drive and brutality are brought to bear upon them.”
-- Jean-Michel Frodon, Cahiers du Cinema
"Dumont drops us into the midst of this
war that’s familiar to our media-saturated eyes, yet strange
and different. It’s the caveman version of Iraq, in which
Demester’s and Blondel’s unit respond with unalloyed
animal instincts after a surprise attack. What’s first felt
is the shock of what these soldiers do to women and villagers, and
the equally savage counter-response the soldiers later endure. What
follows are questions: Is it in the nature of all or only some men
to descend to the level of beasts when chance allows for it? Is
the war in Iraq so fundamentally skewed toward failure (to comprehend
the reality of the place, to understand the people) that it’s
a battlefield comprised solely of booby-traps? Is it possible to
make a war movie that drains all possible cathartic pleasure out
of war-making itself, and leaves only the horror?
“Dumont is at his best, as he is here, when he allows these
issues to float portentously in the atmosphere, and gradually settle
into the viewer’s consciousness. Events, though, have caught
up to Dumont, who’s made a film that not simply foretells
war crimes to come, but marks a leap forward in his maturity as
an artist. For Barbe, back home, pregnant, and hysterically mad,
the war is also quite real (Demester doesn’t need to tell
her what happened: she knows already); and because it is, and because
she’s been able to survive along with Demester, she can make
the final leap. In Flanders, Dumont’s characters actually
reach out to each other, and this is a real development.”
-- Robert Koehler, CinemaScope
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Cannes
Film Festival,