Line up: Emmanuel Schotté, Séverine Caneele, Philippe Tullier
Open: 19:00 - 23:00 hrs
Tickets: € 3
L'HUMANITE 1999
Directed by Bruno Dumont
141 minutes
In French with English subtitles
French director Bruno Dumont always takes us on a sacred/spectral journey that is bleak and sublime. Where most filmmakers are content to tell a simple story, Dumont is always more soul-searching. His movies are a strange mix of carnality, existential void, and spirituality. This one focuses on detective Pharaon De Winter, as he investigtes the murder and rape of a young 11-year-old girl. The brutal inhumanity of this act rattles the detective, and it's impossible for him to comprehend/ reconcile that such obscenity is possible.
So although on the surface this is a police procedural based on a situation like a typical cop flick, Dumont instead turns the tables and it becomes an eerie exploration of our central character's psyche. After all, detective movies are about a search for the truth, it's only that Dumont redirects what kind of truth is uncovered. And if the truth is revealed, it will not be a banal resolution/ conclusion like so many other crime movies. In fact, L'humanité warps genre conventions to the degree that some people have said it's not a police film, but the opposite...an anti-policier.
When it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, it totally polarised the audience. People were shouting, screaming and storming off, while others were in rapture..... including the head of the jury David Cronenberg who showered L'humanité with the Grand Jury prize, and the best acting awards went to Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele. The fact that both top awarded actors were non-professionals was perceived as an insult, a slap in the face to professional careerism, and only added fuel to the outrage. By the way, director Dumont is actually well known for casting his movies by going to unemployment centres in rundown areas of the country. In any case, all these things together blew up and created an international scandal.
The feral murder of the young girl is certainly a desecration, but it's one that reveals another desecration.... not of a church, but of an entire landscape - the post-industrial, rundown, working-class rural region in northern France of Bailleul. A world that has been exploited, ruined and abandoned. That's where the story takes place, and where the director himself was born and raised.
In the 1960s in France there was a string of movies implying that the police and criminals have more in common than people believe. They both have the same mentality and use the same methods (threats, violence, blackmail, punishment, sometimes even torture). This movie takes it a step further where cops who represent law and order might have aspects in common with the people they are hunting down, and who they describe as mentally disabled/ill. This is a movie that captures something unhinged, unstable... a twilight zone where things might not be so black-and-white as they are presented. As always in Dumont's work, it's about spiritual suffering in the modern world.
CINEMA DÉRIVE - ventilator space
Overtoom 301, 2nd floor
Doors open at 19:30, film starts at 20:00
3 euros