Chris Knipp
08-14-2005, 02:52 AM
[Not to be confused with Leonardo Ricagni's 2004 noir (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283090/) 29 Palms, starring Chris O'Donnell, Michael Lerner, and Jeremy Davies.]
(A logical place for this might be the thread on Bruno Dumont started by Oscar Jubis, The Philosopher and the Genital Closeup (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=970), but since this new movie seemed to have been eagerly anticipated by some of our more active members but I can't find any other comment on it, I'm introducing it here. It was discussed on another website (http://www.cinescene.com/howard/3families.htm#twentynine) by Howard Schumann. Has anyone here talked about it? Bruno Dumont's movies always stimulate debate, sometimes among total strangers on the way out of the theater after a viewing.)
Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (http://poll.imdb.com/title/tt0315110/combined) (2003)
Strayed
A young Russian woman and a young American man -- David (David Wissak) and Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva) -- who communicate in minimal French, go out to the desert from LA and stay at a motel in the town of Twentynine Palms, California, which adjoins the Joshua Tree National Park, and make day trips in an all-terrain vehicle and swim and soak in the motel pool in between. Highways, convenience stores, windmills, mountains, rocks, naked bodies, sex, and eventually, rednecks and violence. Dumont was consciously remaking an American horror movie. In his mind it's the quintessential expression of American violence This isn't as vapid a film as Zabriskie Point, but in a way Dumont is as out of place in the American desert as Antonioni was, and Twentynine Palms, with its pretty minimalist images and nice bodies, is a far cry from the semi-civilized naifs and regional specificity of his two powerful earlier movies, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L'Humanité (1999). There's the emptiness but not the passion. This is almost like a fashion shoot. In an interview he says he'd like to make a Hollywood movie. He's ready to change. He doesn't want to go on making the same kind of movie. Well, so, we got this. It's striking and beautiful to look at, but (hastily made, and in a foreign country) it feels drained of everything that made Dumont's work seem so troubling, original, and important: namely the specificity and detail of the observed locales and people. David and Katia are separated from any associations, if they once had them. They're on an idyl, even if it's inarticulate and turns grim. Horror movies have personalities, characters, encounters, interesting sets; this lacks those. Antonioni wouldn't have made a horror movie. Perhaps Dumont shouldn't have tried to either. A disappointing égarement and a hint that Dumont, though he talks a good game (his earnest convictions are expressed in the interview given on the US DVD), may be on the way to becoming more annoying than challenging. But if he goes back to working in Bailleul, in France, where he came from and where he belonged, because he knows the territory there and what he sees there seems real to us, things may get better again.
(A logical place for this might be the thread on Bruno Dumont started by Oscar Jubis, The Philosopher and the Genital Closeup (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=970), but since this new movie seemed to have been eagerly anticipated by some of our more active members but I can't find any other comment on it, I'm introducing it here. It was discussed on another website (http://www.cinescene.com/howard/3families.htm#twentynine) by Howard Schumann. Has anyone here talked about it? Bruno Dumont's movies always stimulate debate, sometimes among total strangers on the way out of the theater after a viewing.)
Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (http://poll.imdb.com/title/tt0315110/combined) (2003)
Strayed
A young Russian woman and a young American man -- David (David Wissak) and Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva) -- who communicate in minimal French, go out to the desert from LA and stay at a motel in the town of Twentynine Palms, California, which adjoins the Joshua Tree National Park, and make day trips in an all-terrain vehicle and swim and soak in the motel pool in between. Highways, convenience stores, windmills, mountains, rocks, naked bodies, sex, and eventually, rednecks and violence. Dumont was consciously remaking an American horror movie. In his mind it's the quintessential expression of American violence This isn't as vapid a film as Zabriskie Point, but in a way Dumont is as out of place in the American desert as Antonioni was, and Twentynine Palms, with its pretty minimalist images and nice bodies, is a far cry from the semi-civilized naifs and regional specificity of his two powerful earlier movies, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L'Humanité (1999). There's the emptiness but not the passion. This is almost like a fashion shoot. In an interview he says he'd like to make a Hollywood movie. He's ready to change. He doesn't want to go on making the same kind of movie. Well, so, we got this. It's striking and beautiful to look at, but (hastily made, and in a foreign country) it feels drained of everything that made Dumont's work seem so troubling, original, and important: namely the specificity and detail of the observed locales and people. David and Katia are separated from any associations, if they once had them. They're on an idyl, even if it's inarticulate and turns grim. Horror movies have personalities, characters, encounters, interesting sets; this lacks those. Antonioni wouldn't have made a horror movie. Perhaps Dumont shouldn't have tried to either. A disappointing égarement and a hint that Dumont, though he talks a good game (his earnest convictions are expressed in the interview given on the US DVD), may be on the way to becoming more annoying than challenging. But if he goes back to working in Bailleul, in France, where he came from and where he belonged, because he knows the territory there and what he sees there seems real to us, things may get better again.