Banal evil

>> Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité is a disturbing character study

by MATTHEW HAYS

L'Humanité is one of those films that lives up to its advance hype. Incredibly strange and almost impossible to categorize, this French film caused a minor furore at Cannes last year when the jury decided to award it with the Grand Jury Prize.

The film had already taken two performance prizes, for Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele, which were entirely understandable and justified (the film's three leads are uncanny in their portrayal of their roles). But controversy around the film as a whole is understandable--at close to three hours, it's an epic of minimalist detail, an exquisite portrait of a strange, almost-autistic figure.

Schotté plays this figure, a police officer who doesn't seem particularly bright. When the film opens with the cold, longish shots of the corpse of an 11-year-old girl who's been brutally murdered and left for dead in a ditch, our suspicions wander to Schotté, with whom nothing seems quite right. But there's also his boorish, libidinous buddy (played by Philippe Tullier), who seems capable of some violence too.

Having set up the film with this synopsis, it must be added that director-writer Bruno Dumont

doesn't really seem so concerned with the film's central murder mystery. Instead, he's collected a series of episodes in the trio's lives, effectively evoking the sheer banality of their existence in this community. Dumont directs his camera to linger on something as banal as a table top during breakfast, while also lingering on shots of Tullier and Caneele shagging with precisely the same length and intensity--granting these vastly different scenes a similar gravity. It's a cunning strategy, one that draws us into their respective worlds, hypnotizing us with a pace that goes directly against the Hollywood code we're so used to seeing unfold.

Of particular note is Schotté's bizarre character study, which gets weirder and weirder as the film progresses. He interrogates various suspects in the case, in one instant necking with someone who's broken down in apparent confession. It's one of many strange moments in L'Humanité, which serves as both Dumont's daring take on humanity and a challenge to his audience. An obtuse style, matched by no simple psychological explanation for his characters' motivations, mark Humanité as a film that will contradict your cinematic expectations. With the amount of typical crap that arrives in our cinemas today, can that be considered a bad thing?

Humanité opens Friday, Sept. 8 at Ex-Centris in its original French version and at Cinéma du Parc in French with English subtitles