Reviews: "Flanders;" "Eagle vs. Shark"
By Jeff Reichert/indieWIRE and Michael Joshua Rowin/indieWIRE
Simple Men: Bruno Dumont’s “Flanders”
Like Gaspar Noe with a colder, reptilian eye, or a brutalist Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont cut a divide through contemporary cinematic circles with his first three features. That this swath is tiny and both his detractors and supporters fall largely within that camp we could label “serious cinephiles” is a shame (“Twentynine Palms” may be the best psychological thriller in recent memory), but understandable: Dumont’s is a singularly unpleasant body of work. But don’t think for a second that unpleasantness precludes magnificence. A critic once wrote of his own inability to climb onboard with (and therefore show much interest in) Dumont’s vision of a blank, empty humanity most often caught painfully rutting and rutted in an existence generally not far removed from the average wild beast. To each his own, but to allow a certain kind of species-bound egoism to deny a priori the validity of Dumont’s query, the idea that perhaps we’re not so far removed in aspect from the beast we eat for dinner or watch on “Planet Earth,” seems a touch naive, or at the very least close-minded. And whether you agree with this taciturn French filmmaker about humankind’s prospects as a species or not, the extreme dourness of his narratives undeniably make his rare moments of spiritual uplift all the more earned.
[SF360.org editor’s note: This review was published originally in indieWIRE May 14, 2007. SF360.org wrote about “Flanders” when it played SFIFF50 this past spring. The film opens at Landmark Theatres in the Bay Area this Friday.]
Dumont’s fourth film, “Flanders,” may be a war film, but even with the addition of tanks, helicopters, mortar fire, and weaponry, the milieu still feels uniquely his own, which is to say that of the rural lower class in France. He starts by watching (even at its most fluid moments, the filmmaker’s camera is nothing if not an observer, or perhaps more appropriately, an intruder) a love triangle play out amongst three youngsters in Flanders: slow, brooding Demester (Samuel Boidin, who also starred in “La vie de Jesus”), his girlfriend Barbe (an almost translucent Adelaide Leroux), and the handsome interloper, Blondel (Henri Cretel), who picks up Barbe after she fights with Demester in a pub. Both of the men have been assigned to the same unit in an ongoing war that rages in a land none of them know for reasons none of them can articulate. Their impending departure weighs heavily on the slow-build of tension amongst the three which the angelic Barbe seems almost able to deflect, but once the two boys are shipped off to a seemingly Middle-Eastern (most will reduce down to Iraq, but it might as well be some neverland-Algeria — a physical landscape for an abstract state of mind) country, atrocities and violence mount and the film grows simultaneously terrifying and sickening.
Abruptly intercut with the action on the battlefield are scenes of Barbe fighting her own battles — with loneliness, with her reputation as the town slut, with Blondel’s child growing in her womb, and, most compellingly, with the possibility that her increasing madness is caused by her ability to witness her suitors’ disturbing acts abroad. Delving too far into the plot mechanics of “Flanders” would be tantamount to giving away the shockingly scary ending of “Twentynine Palms,” in short, ruinous; there’s nothing like watching a Dumont film the first time around for visceral, lasting jolts. It’s a cinema that’s almost unbearable to watch but that exists ecstatic in the mind long after viewing. Comparisons to Bresson are rife and easy given Dumont’s employment of nonprofessional actors, decidedly bleak, questioning outlook, and flashes of queasy spiritual bliss. But in some ways, and especially in “Flanders,” Dumont reminds me of no filmmaker as much as Stanley Kubrick, similarly masterful at cataloguing the myriad forces which impinge upon the stability of the human psyche. In that way, Dumont’s lingering shots of his protagonists’ blank expressions aren’t really attempts to delve into a roiling mental life, or allow us a space to imprint our own ideas of character, but rather to suggest that the high self-estimation mankind affords itself as a species is based on little more than falsity and wishful thinking. Pretty radical stuff, and the kind of investigation that deserves to be seen and debated.
[Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and currently works for Magnolia Pictures. Reprinted with permission, copyright Jeff Reichert, indieWIRE 2007.]
Crazier Love: Taika Waititi’s “Eagle vs. Shark”
[SF360.org editor’s note: This review appeared originally in indieWIRE on June 13, 2007. The films opens Bay Area theatres this Friday.]
Quirky: the one adjective that if employed in a synopsis or review should cause any thoughtful person to avoid a film so described, and a perfect kiss-of-death salvo for “Eagle vs. Shark.” This crowd-pleasing New Zealand indie, developed from the Sundance Director’s and Screenwriter’s Labs (from which the similar “Me and You and Everyone You Know” emerged) and plucked from the vine by savvy Miramax, is the latest in a recent trend of offbeat, adorable stillbirths about families of barely lovable misfits learning valuable life lessons in a world of kitschy crap. The parade of cute begins right off the bat when fast-food employee Lily (Loren Horsley), an awkward collection of Church Lady grimaces masquerading as a “sensitive dreamer,” practices a marriage proposal into her mirror, thus demonstrating that the quirky indie’s favorite go-to device — the head-on camera shot at some “ka-razee” character’s goofy countenance — is in actuality a symptom of rampant narcissism.
In “Eagle vs. Shark” the world only exists for director Taika Waititi to gawk at in stilted compositions mocking tacky decor and drab suburban anomalies. Yet a single element reveals the condescension barely hidden beneath the surface quirk of eccentric losers (the brother who does dreadful imitations, the mentally disturbed man with a porno fetish), wacky fashions (Megadeth t-shirts, track suits, mullets), fey indie rock (The Phoenix Foundation), and needless stop-motion animation inserts: That element is Lily’s love interest, Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), a lesser Napoleon Dynamite lacking even the slightest shred of charm. Jarrod may very well be the most hateful film protagonist in recent memory — spazoidic, violent, arrogant, delusional, petty, mean, disgusting, rude, self-obsessed.
As emotionally stunted as Lily is, it makes no sense that she would fall for this video-game nerd and follow him to his hometown where he plots a “revenge mission” on the high school bully who, we can only imagine, made him into the terrible person he is today. But it also makes little sense that we’re supposed to care about the irredeemable Jarrod’s supposed maturation after Waititi spends the entire film laughing at his pathetic attempts to win approval from his father. “Napoleon Dynamite” worked because there was compassion amidst the grotesquerie; “Eagle vs. Shark” nearly concludes with Jarrod trying to beat up a man in a wheelchair. No amount of animal costume parties can make up for that.
“Napoleon Dynamite” was a pleasant aberration, in that it conveyed at least a whiff of humanity for its annoying protagonist. Otherwise, the quirky indie is wrong for our time. The insular arrested development peddled by these films signals the regression of their makers and target audience into the Never Neverland of self-deprecating navel-gazing and ridicule. A calamitous, unquirky universe exists too conspicuously inside and outside our selves, and beyond the suffocating confines of ironic amusement, for this film to be the least bit relevant or amusing.
[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon. Reprinted with permission, copyright Michael Joshua Rowin, indieWIRE 2007.]
topics: independent film, political film, reviews
06.19.2007