Director: Bruno Dumont
"Do not fear disgrace, ugliness, obscenity.
Do not fear silence, austerity, speechlessness.
There is nothing beautiful to film, ostensibly."
Bruno Dumont from his Notes on Humanite.
When Humanite premiered at Cannes last year it was pretty much reviled by everyone except a handful of critics and the jury -- headed by David Cronenberg -- which gave it three major awards. Now, a year later, it has benefited from reverse backlash and critics from all spectrums of the film world are giving it good reviews.
One of the main reasons it was hated was because it’s a crime investigation film where everything about the lives of the characters and the environment that surrounds them is revealed, but the crime remains pretty much unsolved. Instead of following the crime film formula and giving us motives, suspense or hard evidence, the director, Bruno Dumont, gives us endlessly auster (but scenic) images of the Northern France locale and what seems to be insignificant details about the dull lives of the characters.
In the first scene we see a man running along the horizon of a far off hill -- and since it is shot in CinemaScope it takes him a long time to get from one end to the next. Then we learn that he is a police inspector who is freaking out because he has found a dead little girl lying in a field.
The inspector is named Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) and he is a dim witted, distraught looking man who moves stiffly, shuffles his feet and speaks almost inaudibly ( or is it incompetently). His glassy-eyed lethargic demeanor is the opposite of what we would expect from a police inspector investigating a murder. Plus, he lives with his mother! And because of this it seems the director wants us to believe, right from the beginning, that the inspector has committed the crime. But this is just too obvious a conceit, yet it manages to draw us in closer to the mystery and eventual investigation of the crime.
Pharaon has something (I’m not entirely sure what) for his next door neighbor Domino (Severine Caneele), a big-boned woman who could pass as a Neanderthal in a caveman movie. She works in a factory, complains about the heat and when bored (which is always) has sex with her boyfriend Joseph (Philippe Tullier). The actress who plays Domino doesn’t have much of a range but is endowed with such a profound physical presence that it’s easy to see why Dumont chose her for the role. And he uses her physicality to full effect, including three hard core sex scenes with her boyfriend.
The title 'Humanite' refers to the compassion and benevolence humans potentially have towards one another and it fits Pharaon’s character quite well, since he is extremely compassionate, even though he does display it in an awfully bizarre way. For instance, in one scene at the police station he hugs a drug dealer closely, sniffs his neck and gives him the fond look of an admirer, then he leaves the room without saying a word.
Humanite is maddeningly full of such enigmatic scenes that if you take it literally it can become confusing. I’m not sure what to make of the scene were Pharaon is seen hovering a few feet off the ground in his garden, except that maybe he is such a good humanitarian that he has attained sainthood.
If you go to see Humanite note that it is one of the most rigorously difficult films to come along in quite some time. It is a film full of uncomfortable silences and it makes the audience wait and wait and wait in this slow-motion world until its denouement, which is so subtle that I had to watch the film a second time to get it’s full meaning. Yet, it does have its own internal logic that makes for great conversation and debate when it’s over.*
The strength of the film is primarily in Dumont's cinematography which utilizes wide framing shot which he holds for a while letting us soak in their meaning. He lets us feel the heat and the boredom of the day. He shows us, primarily, that the death of the little girl is really less outrageous than it is a harsh reality of life.
Humanite will undoubtedly suffer from reverse, reverse backlash since it eschews genre expectations and takes its sweet time developing its story. Most will agree that its commercial prospects are pretty limited, but for those who like intellectual stimulation and who are adventurous enough to watch a film that wouldn’t exist if a test audience got their hands on it then Humanite is the film for you.
* Don't read if you haven't seen the ending:
Many critics have their own interpretion of the ending, some of which I find flat wrong. In the final scene we see Pharaon facing a window and if you look closely you can see that is wearing handcuffs. Kent Jones writing in Film Comment believes that this shot implicates Pharoan in the crime but if's obvious to me that he is a man who empathizes with criminals to the point that he would handcuff himself for his feelings. And since the murderer is actually Joseph -- a man close to him -- he feels terrible empathy. There are many reasons to believe this like the shot of Pharaon hugging the drug dealer but the most significant is the title of the film itself.