by MATTHEW HAYS

It must be the strangest, most disturbing road-trip movies in years. As well as being unusual, Twentynine Palms, the latest from French director Bruno Dumont (La Vie de Jésus, L'Humanité), has proven extremely controversial, both at Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival, where its screenings were met with numerous walkouts and much head-scratching.

The film is nothing if not brazen. Twentynine Palms has a bare-bones plot: a seemingly mismatched couple (she's from Eastern Europe and he's American) leave Los Angeles to drive through Twentynine Palms, California, on a road trip. They occasionally stop along the way to make passionate love in the desert sand, or a swimming pool, or wherever else they see fit. All the while, Dumont builds a tremendous sense of impending doom: despite the film's limited dialogue (the couple has trouble communicating as her English is as limited as his French), we can tell something horrific, something very, very violent is in the cards for our carnal protagonists.

While Twentynine Palms has divided audiences and critics, its sheer audacity is difficult not to admire. Dumont has crafted a minimalist wonder, a film carved down to the bare essentials: sex and death. It won't win him any fans in middle America, those are precisely the kinds of sensibilities Dumont seems intent on offending with his work. We sat down to talk at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the stoic Dumont seemed to be taking all of the walkouts in stride.

Mirror: I've read interviews in which you've talked about certain codes in American films. Yet this film feels very un-American in many respects. What are the specific American films you were thinking of while making Twentynine Palms?

Bruno Dumont: You're quite right. I wasn't thinking of American films per se, but I thought that being in the U.S. and filming there, that would set up a connection that would be quite clear, through the geography. I've seen so many American films that there's not one that stands out. What I was particularly interested in was the actual presence of American sensibility - being in the same spaces, the same locations, my intention was to change the space by filming it in an entirely different way.

European touch

M: To me it kind of felt like Antonioni and Pasolini go on a road trip in California.

BD: I feel in my own modest way that I share the European point of view with these directors, their way of looking at things. Certainly, it's from my own perspective. You've mentioned those two directors who are artists. Not all American directors are artists.

M: In a sense, with this film, you've stripped cinema down to its bare essentials: this is a movie about sex and death.

BD: Which are essentially the same thing. The two are linked, clearly. They bring the same thing: pleasure and pain. When you are looking at sexuality, you're also looking at death. That's probably why we're killing so much - to feel alive.

Those are not necessarily directives I gave to the actors, but the groan of sexual pleasure is the same as the groan of agony, when someone's in pain or dying.

M: The sex is operatic in this film.

BD: Yes, you're right. When I'm making a film, though, I don't think about it quite that far. It's a strong sensation, it's not something I direct as such. The script is never set in stone, I just go with what I'm feeling… even now, as we're talking, it's still beyond my comprehension. Cinema has a life of its own. The more you're working with actors, especially on lovemaking scenes, the closer we got to something like that - "that" being the screams and groans.

M: During the press screening I attended, there were walkouts during the sex scenes. Why do you think people are still affronted by such scenes?

BD: The main reason I think is that the movies we see now are just for entertainment's sake. This has a huge effect on the average moviegoer's sensibility. Their sensibility has been assaulted when they see a movie like this. People are still having problems and complexes with their own bodies. They're taking those things that are there and not really coming to grips with it. That's because commercial films, they show love scenes, but they're done in a stylized manner, with music and so on. So it's done in a way to which people are accustomed. My scenes are very realistic and that really shocks people. Because life isn't like commercial cinema at all.

Real love

M: Would you think of your film as entirely realistic?

BD: In a sense, yes. But for me what I need to do also is to have some truth but also poetry in my films. I need truth and poetry in my films. There has to be some reality, but I need to capture the imagination… there must be poetry as well. I like things to be strange.

M: Has there been a marked difference between European and North American audience reaction to Twentynine Palms?

BD: I'm not quite sure what the reaction is entirely, as it's played two festivals so far. It's quite surprising in that the Europeans seem to be very influenced by the North Americans, in terms of being shocked by it.

M: Have you been accused of outright sensationalism with this movie?

BD: Yes, some have said that. But those who have understood, they get it. Those who don't understand what I'm trying to do, they'll take offence.

M: What's been the most surprising reaction for you?

BD: The critics have been very harsh and negative, people who can't stand to see such violence. That's been very odd. I've also heard exactly the contrary. It seems like there's nothing in the middle. There's no consensus at all, and I don't think that consensus is possible on this film. It's way too radical to have a moderate response to this film. I've even read some very fascist attitudes to this movie, that some have said I don't have the right to make a movie like this. The point is not being well accepted, the point is to have the right to make a film like this if you wish to. I've heard those negative responses from both French and American critics.

Twentynine Palms has its Montreal premiere as part of Cinemania, which screens from today, Nov. 6, until Nov. 16

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