L'Humanité (1999)

Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité is a sort of anti-thriller. There is a crime, yes, and even a police officer. On top of that, the police officer fits the moody thriller model: he is traumatized, having lost his wife and child. But we have very little of frantic puzzle-solving. Instead, the pace is languid, people do their erratic things and gruesome things tend to happen. Dumont has a way with style and atmosphere, but his judgment I do not trust, at least not based on this film that has an inclination towards excessive excavations of the Darkness. The story is loosely centered on the murder of a young girl (one example of the excess I mentioned: the girl's naked corpse is studied in close-up; somehow, I don't see the necessity of that - at all). A small town police officer gets nowhere in clarifying what has happened. The film follows his ordinary life, in which he hangs out with his friends, two lovers. There is a sort of erotic tension between him and one of the friends, and I can't say that the film provides a very insightful image of this kind of gloomy situation. The other friend is jealous and there are understated insinuations and wide-eyed glances (the guileless police officer is an expert in delivering these elusive glances). At its best, the film takes us to unexpected places. The three friends go on a Sunday trip to the sea. Everything they do is slightly out of order. And this is the logic of the entire film: ordinary people on the verge of explosion. I am worried that the image Dumont presents of social life is that of conventions and that this is something he interprets as 'the human condition' (as if we would be confronted with a naked truth about the state of humanity). The small town and its secrets - you know all about that already. It is not as a psychological or existential investigation that the film made an impression on me. The cinematography and sense for angles and pace saved the film from becoming yet another example of deconstructing a familiar topic and turning the conventions of film inside out. Still, I must say that one of the striking aspect of the movie is how one scene is followed by a contrasting one, so that I am forced to re-think what I have just seen. Dumont's film has many similarities with the sorts of topics Haneke explores, and stylistically they are close as well. Sadly, L'Humanité is also marred by Hanekes tendency to paint one-dimensional images of human life.