E-Mail This Article to a Friend Palms pilot Bruno Dumont tours the erotic desert BY GERALD PEARY

The official Web site for Twentynine Palms, California, population 21,000, is boosterish Chamber of Commerce stuff: "We are the gateway to Mojave Desert, Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave Preserve, and the great California Outback." There’s no interest in cultivating a Twin Peaks vibe, therefore no mention of the ghoulish, offputting Bruno Dumont picture (at the Brattle Theatre this weekend, July 16 through 18), which is also called Twentynine Palms and which was filmed in these environs and mostly in this town.

Are they missing the chance for a Prince Edward Island–like breakthrough, Japanese bus tours making the pilgrimage to the sacred site of Anne of Green Gables? Hardly. Twentynine Palms would draw only the most morbid tourist to where the big movie scenes occurred: the squabbling, the fornicating, the penultimate Deliverance moment, the ultimate Psycho ending. Twentynine Palms is a slasher film waiting to happen, and wait you will, for almost two stretched-thin hours before the violence smashes through. Dumont’s film is a monosyllabic road movie in which characters ride and ride on the highway with a dribble of talk, perhaps two lines of dialogue, every hundred miles.

Think Wim Wenders’s Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. Here we’ve got David (David Wissak), a floppy-haired photographer scouting a shoot in his Hummer, accompanied by his Russian-but-French-speaking girlfriend, Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva), who could have been a Modigliani model. We know nothing at all about our two protagonists, and we learn nothing factual (they never query each other, or refer to their pasts), only what we observe of their behavior. Katia has moments of emotional fragility: she’s hysterical when a dog is hit by a car, she gets wounded by David when his sexual advances get hyper-aggressive. David is a wound-up screwing machine, and there’s an edge whenever he has a sudden go at Katia, bouncing her head on his cock, screaming out in orgasm, a chest-pounding Tarzan howling on jungle vines. Katia can groove on David’s supermanliness; she rests her head on his thighs and says "Je t’aime" after he’s exploded in her mouth. Then, turning on a dime, she becomes appalled by his behavior and wants to run away from him.

The film’s most telling moment comes when David explains to Katia the premise of the Jerry Springer show he’s enmeshed in: "A father confesses to his wife that he’s slept with his daughter." "Poor thing," Katia responds. "Who?", David wonders, not getting it. "You wouldn’t do that?", Katia asks, intuiting that he’s capable of unspeakable deeds.

And speaking of the unspeakable: on the TV in the background, we see Jerry’s cave people, a yahoo chorus to the loaded exchange between David and Katia.

Bruno Dumont is the French filmmaker whose two earlier works, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L’humanité (1999), were gothic regional tales set in rural non-tourist, blue-collar France: cruel, bloody, Bressonian, intensely spiritual and philosophical. Even among heady film critics, these works created a marked division, being both championed and reviled. I was among Dumont’s staunch defenders (a minority) when L’humanité won the Grand Jury Prize (second only to the Palme d’Or) from the David Cronenberg–led jury at Cannes 1999. I thought that metaphysical murder mystery, however grotesque, was a kind of masterpiece. Yet I step away from Twentynine Palms, which seems as bogus and needlessly ugly as L’humanité’s detractors claim it to be. (Its chief virtue is Georges Lechaptois’s sublime cinematography of the Southern California desert.) Was Twentynine Palms rejected by Cannes 2003, or was it finished too late to qualify? Whatever, the premiere came at Venice 2003. I wasn’t there; the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim reported a volatile, mostly negative reception, the international critics corps being unmoved at the sight of Dumont’s Adam and Eve cavorting bare-assed in the Joshua Tree forest. Dumont stood his ground, lecturing the skeptical who attended his press conference, "I encourage you to take off your clothes and go naked in Mother Nature."

NOTE THE REVIVAL 35mm screening of the 1942 Busby Berkeley musical For Me and My Gal at the Harvard Film Archive this Saturday and Sunday, July 16 and 17. It’s a chauvinist, patriotic MGM picture in which Gene Kelly takes time off from singing to battle World War I Germans and win back partner Judy Garland. Better than the fighting are the super-duper Kelly-Garland musical numbers, "Ballin’ the Jack" and the title song, in both of which Garland’s unheralded hoofing almost keeps up with the suave steps of smoothie Kelly.