In-humanité?

Bruno Dumont's controversial prizewinner

No prizes in years at Cannes have so offended the gathered critics as the three -- the Grand Jury Prize, Best Actor, Best Actress -- that last year's David Cronenberg-led jury bestowed on French filmmaker Bruno Dumont's L'humanité (which is getting a two-week run at the MFA beginning this Friday). How, the critics argued, could the jury bypass Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother in favor of Dumont's perverse, offputting tale of sweaty sex and child murder? How could legitimate thespians (say, All About My Mother's Cecilia Roth and Felicia's Journey's Bob Hoskins) be passed over for Dumont's raw, totally amateur leads, Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele, neither of whom had ever seen a movie camera? Wasn't Dumont simply typecasting his low-life, loser protagonists, a dubious-intellect country cop and a crude, big-bodied female assembly-line worker? When the bug-eyed Schotté accepted his Best Actor award and seemed as dazed and dopy and inarticulate as the character he'd played, the critics went crazy. What an outrage!

Not at all, not at all. To my mind, L'humanité is a passionate and important work from the French filmmaker of The Life of Jesus, and Schotté and Caneele were inspired castings. Maybe Schotté is an odd bird, but what newcomer to the spotlight wouldn't be thrown off by the craven crowds and red carpet of Cannes? When the awards were announced, I for one felt vindicated, and pleased that Cronenberg's jury had the courage to be so unpopular.

Shot in Bailleul, a working-class town in northern France, L'humanité is on its prime level a classic policier. At the beginning of the film, an 11-year-old girl who has just left a schoolbus is raped and murdered. The local police are called in to investigate, though this crime is much bigger and more horrific than they're used to.

A portly Commandant (Ghislain Ghesquière) is in charge, but much of the footwork is left to the unlikely person of the snail-paced, heavy-breathing detective Pharaon (Schotté). Pharaon gets on the case but in the oddest, most indirect way: smelling the earth, sniffing the hair of suspects, riding his bike in the country, interviewing witnesses in an opaque manner. As with all idiosyncratic sleuths since Sherlock Holmes, we are left to ponder whether there isn't a hidden method to Pharaon's way, especially his maddening slowness: L'humanité is a two-and-a-half-hour film. Is he on to something? Or, also possible, is he just stupid? A stooge from The Andy Griffith Show? Forrest Gump, Detective?

While the investigation bumps about, there is a second story, this one about Pharaon's infatuation with the scraggy-haired, factory girl Domino (Caneele), who lives down the street. She is involved with, and in love with, Joseph (Philippe Tullier), a short-fused, unsentimental bus driver. On three occasions we are privy to Domino and Joseph having sex; each time it's brute, squeaky, animal-like. There's more. Bruno Dumont holds on a close-up of Domino's vagina, to remind us of L'humanité's most disturbing shot: the bloodied vagina of the dead girl.

Most of L'humanité stays with the three characters, who hang about together in a kind of Nicholas Ray-like marginalized ersatz family: think Jim, Judy, and Plato of Rebel Without a Cause. But the settings are another splendidly breathing character: the austere de Chirico downtown street hit by a melancholy sunlight; the rich, damp Flanders countryside. Recall the tension in North by Northwest when Cary Grant gets off that bus in the middle of nowhere, that disquieting sensation that something horrible is about to happen, just before that crop duster starts dusting. That's what L'humanité feels like, a 148-minute cusp-of-nightmare.

At the end of L'humanité, the murderer reveals himself. It's a great, satisfying, shimmering payoff: the killer's identity is a shock, but also, as it should be, you've known who all along.

At a Cannes press conference, Bruno Dumont explained his non-professional casting: "I find it difficult with actors to find those who are close to my characters. I want people who embody the characters in a way close to their natural being. For Pharaon, I went to Bailleul, the city where I made the film. I met people from the city hall, and from the local employment house. Then someone told me there is a former soldier who could be interested. That idea interested me, so I put him [Emmanuel Schotté] against a wall. I had him act some scenes, I saw his eyes, how very easily he became the character.

"So I eliminated the fiction character and he replaced the fiction character. It was him. That's the way he walks, folds his arms. What attracted me is his way of talking. He says simple things. He says hello in a peculiar way. He takes us outside of ourselves, to the margins of reality."

What about L'humanité's deliberate pace? "You shouldn't be afraid of long sequences. When you make a film, you spend a lot of time thinking about time. Don't spare the spectators. They also can wait." And the murder? "I filmed it in all its crudeness. Cinema should film the inhuman, but the meaning of a film should be able to appease the horror."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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