Flanders

The Flanders countryside in northern France. Demester farms; between him and his neighbour Barbe there is a relationship neither of them names. Demester and the other young men of the village are sent to a war in a desert that is never identified. What they do there does not leave them when they come back. Barbe stays in the village. Bruno Dumont writes and directs. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2006. Dumont's method is unchanged: the actors are not professionals but people from the region, and there is no music, no explanation, no interior voice. The camera records and does not comment. What the film refuses to do is anchor the war anywhere. The country, the sides and the reasons are never given. The vagueness is deliberate: Dumont is not describing a particular war but what ordinary people become in the presence of violence, and who is fighting whom does not change that. The cut between the village and the desert is his main instrument. The same silence, the same emptiness, the same faces; the difference between the two places steadily disappears. Who it is for: viewers who want hard, unadorned European cinema, Dumont, and narration without commentary. Who it is not for: sexual violence and war crimes are shown directly, the characters are deliberately opaque, and the film offers no emotional support at all.