johnnyboyz Flandres is a depiction of what happens when simple people are placed into complicated situations; it is a quite shocking, although stirring, war-set drama which is more about the tragedy of how human beings can slump to the depths we're able than it is about the tragedy of war itself. The folk in the film are unassuming, uncreative and with little to say nor do during their days in an undetermined, mostly rural, French speaking nation; the sorts of scenarios they eventually come to find themselves in are very much the opposite – the film playing out like a perverse circus of what happens when a test gerbil is placed in an environment it has little-to-no-hope of conquering, and all for our viewing displeasure as we sit back and witness the experiment.People in Flandres make love without emotion; they live life without empathy; and find it difficult to react to levels of deplorable violence. It is to this extent that Bruno Dumont's film is more a burning, nihilistic drama than a war film per se; a film that weeps for mankind, a film depicting a desensitisation that the species has for love; violence; fellow man and attitudes towards life. The film follows a young man named André (Boidin), an ugly man; a simple man, a farmer in the wooded plains of what could be France; what might be Belgium or what might even be somewhere as seemingly disassociated and arbitrary as Luxembourg. Farm life is routine: it snows in the winter and a lot of walking is generally required in a zone cut off from urbanised living. These people, other farmers and the young females living in close proximity, rarely speak with whatever communication required between them done so via glances and meagre actions. Since there is nary an awful lot that needs getting done in the first place, it is all that these people need to amass in their communication in order to get things done. So rarely do things happen in the lives of these people that a crude, seemingly random, sexual relationship between André and young Barbe (Leroux) strikes us as almost illegitimate.It is on one of these days that one of André's few friends relays to him that he will be going off to war in the near future. In their leaning up against a barn wall, while appearing to systematically stare off into the distance beyond a nearby gate at what's beyond, we sense that this might very well be a jump for this character greater than it might be for others: nary do these people treads beyond into the wider unknown and what has just been spoken of would be a drastic change. Sure enough, Dumont's cut from the ice cold European territory to the flat, arid deserts of this unspecified place engulfed in a war between Europeans and Arabs is the sort of jump in composition that can only emphasise this.André has clambered aboard in the drafting process, the idea that where they're headed is the unknown and the ambiguity surrounding what the war is for, as well as you might say the specific name of the country, is supposed to encapsulate most of what's going on in the Middle East, as Caucasians from most nations vie with locals in a place of which they've probably not previously heard for surface means of which they think they're aware. Trying to work out where exactly the warzone is acts as a pleasing distraction once all the war-set nastiness kicks off; where the clear inflection is Iraq or Afghanistan, Dumont appears to tie in the jungles of somewhere like North Korea to add to the idea this foreign war might just as well be anywhere. The wartime sequences are as harrowing as any from most war films, while the film itself is often constructed as if not even a war film in the first place but some sort of survival horror piece wherein folk have wondered into a Hellish bloodbath where one can only (how did Mr. Blonde put it in Reservoir Dogs?) "Pray for a quick death you aren't going to get".Dumont doffs his cap to the likes of Full Metal Jacket with a sequence involving a sniper, a confrontation which eventually leads onto the encountering of a child soldier and the nastiness which comes with that. His greatest achievement, however, is how he constructs this idea of life on the homestead and life at war being more intrinsically linked than one might think - principally, the merciless disregard for young life in the executing of these child soldiers as well as the domestic termination of an unborn as well as the desire to instigate casual sexual intercourse with the women of where one happens to find one's self. This whole idea of white Western men, few of whom are bright in the first place, arriving on the shores of what is otherwise a stark change in climate and way of life in the form of a foreign country, before instigating their attitudes and ways of life upon what's around them, also feels apparent if not the primary focus. With a steady eye for agonised detail, Flandres is the painful piece of cinema I wasn't expecting heading in – its topical nature combined with its grizzled aesthetic demonstrates a real talent at work while the experience as a whole stays with you for some considerable time, all of which adds up to something worth tracking down.

mfd1213 Bruno Dumont seems to create controversy in every one of his films, but I've only seen "Flandres" and "L'Humanite. " Dumont's film language is very bleak and very stark. He uses little to no soundtrack music, letting ambient sound to substitute. His characters seem to writhe in a painfully prosaic film world, their experiences and torments more vivid for the lack of melodrama.Demeste (Samuel Boidin) and Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) have a complicated romantic relationship in a rural farming village somewhere in Francophone Europe. Barbe is promiscuous with other men, yet Demeste seems to permit the trysts without comment. You only see his brooding glares. All the young men in the area enlist to go off for war somewhere in an Arab desert. They young soldiers take their emotional baggage with them into this hostile environment. There are fistfights in the camp, firefights in the field, and no one understands the language or mannerisms of the locals. Inevitably, acts of war become acts of war crimes. Seemly normal guys go off to war and become brutal Neanderthals murdering, molesting and bailing. The survivors, like all survivors, are left to try and understand what happened and what they've become.

Seamus2829 Bruno Dumont seems to have an obsession for depicting his fellow French citizens in some pretty dark & dismal situations. Thankfully, this makes for some edgy,concise drama. Although I walked away major disappointed with the last film of his I saw (The Twenty Nine Palms), this made up for it in spades. The plot concerns the tentative relation ship between a farm hand (Samuel Boidin),and the local town slut (Adelaide Leroux),who's screwing everybody in the local phone book. Andre has been called to the Army to fight in a war in a non specific area (Iraq?). Andre soon finds out about the hell that is war,while Barbe deals with her own demons. If you've ever seen any of Dumont's other films will know that he doesn't make things easy for his audiences (sex that is depicted in his films is generally unerotic,if not downright ugly to watch,plus violence is never approached with restraint). If you've managed to make it this far, 'Flandres',although unpleasant to watch,is none the less,a film well worth checking out.

roy-blake Flandres won the grand prize at Cannes, so somebody must have liked it. I didn't, much. The film takes a depressed, and depressing, look at the life of a French peasant, who becomes a soldier in a nameless war somewhere in the Mideast. At the beginning of the movie, we see him doing farm chores, wandering around the muddy barnyard with a pig (a heavy-handed metaphor Eisenstein would have loved), and having Hobbesian sex with his girlfriend (nasty, brutish and short, possibly the least erotic scene of consensual sex ever filmed.) Later he denies that they are a couple, so she takes revenge by immediately going off with another man. Good for her, and too bad she can't stay away from this brute.Both of the heroine's lovers are drafted and sent to some faraway desert land where they join a small platoon. The men know nothing about the war, and seem to care less. They fight when they have to, and some of them, including our hero, rape a lone woman when they get the chance. The woman turns out to be a rebel officer, and when the men are captured she has one of them castrated and shot. He turns out not to be one of the men who raped her. No justice here, just chance and random cruelty --- we get the point.Our hero eventually escapes, after leaving the girl's other lover, who is wounded, to be killed by the rebels. (Not that any heroism on his part would have helped, they would merely both have been killed.) He has been moved enough by his experience to mutter "I love you" as they have sex again. This time the sex is just as boorish, but the sun is shining and the girl has an air of resignation rather than frustration.The film is well made in a minimalist sort of way, for which its director has been much praised. However, I felt that the points have been made before, and more effectively. I also thought I detected a whiff of condescension, the Paris intellectual looking down his fine long nose at the dirty peasants and their humdrum lives devoid of any real consciousness. I don't, personally, think that's fair.