L'humanité

Plot synopsis:
In the far north of France, filmed in Bailleul, a girl of 11 is raped and murdered as she walked to her parents' remote farm from the school bus. Called onto the case, Inspector Pharaon de Winter feels extreme revulsion. After losing his wife and child in an accident, he now lives quietly with his widowed mother.
At the weekend his neighbour Domino, who is sympathetic to his shocked state, asks him to join her and her lover Joseph, a bus driver. They go to the seaside and to a restaurant, but the reserved Pharaon finds Joseph ignorant and coarse.
The police investigation moves slowly, with Pharaon looking into possibilities such as whether the murderer was a bus driver or a psychiatric patient. Noting that the murder site could be seen from Eurostar trains, he goes to London to interview passengers. But with no firm lead, the case is taken over by the Lille police.
The factory where Domino works goes on strike and the police, led by Pharaon, have to quell a demonstration. Though outwardly angry, in fact Domino admires his quiet determination and offers herself to him. But he is not ready for such a relationship, and his mother warns her off.
Then the Lille police arrest Joseph. When Pharaon gets to the police station, he finds him beaten up and weeping. Being a man of deep feeling, he comforts him. When he goes home, his mother is out and Domino is at the kitchen table weeping. He comforts her. The final shot shows Pharaon sitting in a chair in his office at the police station, staring out the window, with handcuffs visibly shackling his wrists.

Tags: violence, murder

Review:
L'HUMANITE is the kind of movie that, while you're watching it, you feel can drive you crazy in places, but which you know you'll live with and re-play in your head for the rest of your life.
Although many people find themselves puzzled by the characters (virtually everyone in the show i attended came out of the cinema looking almost personally insulted by the film) i think that if you know and love Dostoevsky's books you won't find them so hard to understand.
"The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth" - Bruno DumontIn L'Humanite, by Bruno Dumont (La Vie de Jesus), Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) is a Police Superintendent called upon to investigate the murder and rape of an 11-year old girl.
Dumont devotes long stretches of the film to simply observing Pharaon going about his life: eating an apple, tending his garden, watching a soccer game on television, interacting with his mother, or being a friend to his neighbor Domino (Severine Caneele), a rugged factory worker and her obnoxious bus-driver boyfriend Joseph (Philippe Tullier).
That took about 20 minutes, and once I'd finished the film I re-watched those first 20 minutes again.A policeman investigates the brutal murder of a young girl in a French town and that's pretty much it.
It will polarise opinion like few other films I've seen so I can't recommend it to everyone (and there are some very graphic sex scenes), but I thought it was amazing..
On the surface, L'Humanite is about a detective, Pharaon, dealing with his hyper sensitive nature to a rape/murder of a young girl he is investigating, but especially for his unrequited love to his neighbor, Domino.
No-one smiles at all during the film (neither would I if I had their lives), and although Domino seems to have a healthy sexual appetite she doesn't seem to enjoy sex at all.The whole experience is depressing and ponderous, the director lingering over each scene in a way that drove me crazy rather than striking me with the beauty of his technique.Too many questions were left in my mind: why does he sniff the Algerian man's head?
In fact it just became more and more frustrating - especially at the end with the levitating, the kiss and Phaeron's handcuffs - why why why?!The film went back and forth between utter torturous boredom (don't get me wrong - I don't mind a slowly developing story but there wasn't even that!) and shocking close ups of monotonous sex scenes..
Do not wear a watch when seeing this film, as you will be astonished at how little is explained or learned over huge stretches of time.This is the story of a "police superintendent" who is deeply troubled by the brutal murder of a little girl, though actually he seems troubled before then.
Here we have another study by the director of the Life of Jesus (which incidentally is about a small town too)which shows, from the surface, how a Police Superintendant copes with the brutal rape and murder of a young girl.
Occasionally, these very long slow sequences are interrupted by shocking stills, such as a close up of female genitalia, shown for one full minute of film time (audience crowd laughing in the last 20 seconds, as to say, "what's the message?").
How they ever solved a crime is beyond me.Obligatory sex scenes are awful, and gratitious.Eventual villain of the piece (he raped and killed an 11 year old girl) is signposted very early and no surprise unless your are similarly dimwitted.Uninspiring camera work.The director was there saying that it is up to the audience to provide their own interpretation on the proceedings.
L'Humanite is pseudo-intellectual trash designed to be anti-Hollywood so that the Cannes judges could assert their independence from the Oscars.The IMDb reviewer states: "Unlike Hollywood movies - which usually force the audience into overdrive - this forces the audience to slow down and look at some of life's tiniest and most mundane features in great detail."  You would have to be catatonic to stare at some of these images this long and move as slowly at these characters.
I watched this movie last year at the French Film Festival which is held every June in Yokohama, where I live.
It is competent, straightforward, unstylized, perhaps even dull; in other words, the cinematography serves the story perfectly.The sedate pacing might not be a problem with different cinematography, which would affect the story for the better: the film is a psychological exploration, yet the people we're meant to sympathize with are typically shown in long shots or in closeup but with largely unchanging expressions.
This French film is supposedly about a creepy, dim-witted cop who investigates the rape and murder of a young girl in a small town.
I will never watch another movie from Bruno Dumont for the rest of my life, and I will never get back the 148 minutes that he stole from me through Humanite..
In France, in the small-town of Bailleul , the weird, melancholy, lonely and widow police superintendent Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is investigating the brutal murder of an eleven years old girl, who was raped while returning from school.
The trauma with the character of Pharaon, being consumed by his grieving for the death of wife and daughter, by his repressed love for Domino, by the scene of the brutal death of the child and by the pressure of the command of the police, is amazingly performed by Emmanuel Schotté.
By film's end, you will realize how human these people really are, because their secrets are no different than ours, and their struggles reflect our struggles, despite the fact they live in a place where nothing ever happens.
Unfairly maligned (although admittedly slow-moving and taxing) French film about a small-town police superintendent investigating a brutal rape and murder.
Bruno Dumont's 'Humanity' (L'Humanite´) is a film that easily invites controversy(though such a choice situation musn't already alarm film people--spectators and creators alike--for there has always been and will always be films that arouse controversy, whether intended or not, from Luis Bunuel's short 'Un Chien Andalou' and Orson Welles' legendary 'Citizen Kane', to the almost-obscure 'Deep Crimson' by Arturo Ripstein and 'The Piano Teacher' by Michael Haneke).When the film was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 1999 Cannes International Film Festival, the director had to suffer the humiliation of being loudly jeered upon reaching the stage by "some people" present during the rites.I have no idea though if Emmanuel Schotte and Severine Caneele had to go through the same ordeal when they were awarded the Best Actor and Best Actress awards, respectively, for the film(though that's not an unlikely possibility, specially if one learns that both were non-professionals performing their very first lead roles in the film).After seeing 'Humanity' myself recently, I was quite amused at how easily I made "enemies" with a few acquaintances(who saw the film, too) when I unhesitatingly told them that it's a good film, even being brave enough to point out that it's one of the best, daring and original works in recent years.Even if I would be put in a quixotic position for championing the film, I would not in the least be bothered, for I honestly believe in my conviction(anyway, I only have the Cannes jurors, headed at the time by David Cronenberg, to back me up).The general hostility toward 'Humanity' converges upon the assertion that the film is nothing but a "pointless", "senseless", and "self-indulgent" piece of cinematic "trash." I can't and won't blame them;rather, I appreciate these people for always having a ready, but not-so-novel, tirade against a film that doesn't readily lend itself to general viewership and appreciation and exactly conform to the accepted "entertainment" standards of movie fare(Bunuel's 'Viridiana', Antonioni's 'Blowup' and Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' were among the classic casualties).What's wrong with 'Humanity'?
As it appears, some people can't see the point in why a film that's supposed to center on a police investigator's hunt for the culprit in a gruesome rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl would eventually delve, for the entire 148 minutes, into "nothing"--into "inactivity" and "complacency" that have completely "nothing to do" with the basic plot.Sad to say, the film is not the average edge-of-your-seat, popcorn-munching manhunt thriller with you-already-know-what-happens-next twists and turns--and it doesn't intend to be one.Said differently, 'Humanity' is not an easy fare--in the sense that it painstakingly brings the viewers into an intense and intimate contact with the subterranean layers and subconscious motives--with what really lies beneath--of human behavior and relationships.The film becomes a device for a psychoanalytic coming-to-terms with our own humanity.Maybe that scared off--subconsciously--those who decry the film, as a Freudian analysis is likely to result in.However, Bruno Dumont doesn't profess to give the answers, but to simply describe, a kind of scientific documentation.This can be seen in the manner in which the filmmaker narrates the film--and this is where the issue comes from.Being a specimen of what can be termed as Cinema of Naturalism(Erick Zonca's 'Dreamlife of Angels' and the Dardenne brothers' 'La Promesse' and 'Rosetta' fall under this;even Dumont's introductory film, 'Life of Jesus'), Dumont does away with the professional maneuverings of acting and scene construction.Instead, in a modernist interpretation of the Dziga Vertov-principle "life caught unawares", every moment is presented without the principal figures having to be "aware" that they're making a film;everyone behaves intuitively and instinctively, as if in complete "disobedience" of any filmic instruction.And the result is a naturalism that is brutally, graphically raw and inherently incendiary.The incapacity--due to a deeply-harbored personal trauma--of the police investigator (Schotte) to pursue the culprit and thus serve due justice is carefully and uncompromisingly reflected in his fractured day-to-day interaction with other people(his mother, the lovers next door, his superior), where emotions are kept unexpressed and any chance for bonding and intimacy is kept at bay.Even the persons surrounding the troubled and stoic policeman are not without their inner ailments, mainly repressed but now-and-then provoked by the sporadic violence and tension that erupt within their remote and quiet provincial town, otherwise a wonderland of lust and idleness.
The film certainly is one that either you will love or hate judging by the previous reviews - check out "What the hell is this?", "150 minutes of suffering, only for stubborn art movie fans with a high boredom threshold level" and "Is life really this boring?".
Also, like his contemporaries Gaspar Noé and Carlos Reygadas, it could be argued that Dumont makes films that challenge the viewer to engage with a story that will undoubtedly take us to some very dark and often shockingly immoral places; giving us characters that are morally ambiguous, often loathsome and, in the case of our central protagonist here, almost pitiful.
There aren't many filmmakers who would choose as their hero of a bleak detective thriller an innocent man-child who seems to be as socially inept and emotionally damaged as a person could possibly be, and yet, with Police Chief Pharaon De Winter, that is exactly what we get.Dumont makes his bleak, desolate vision obvious right from the start, with the horrendous discovery of a murdered and mutilated child left naked and bleeding in a stark, autumnal field.
It's an image that both establishes and surmises the film as a thematic whole; the loss of innocence being central both with the murder of the child and with the character of Pharaon himself.
It is the idea of back-story and the fragile demeanour of Pharaon - and to an extent the evocative performance of non-professional actor Emmanuel Schotte - which anchors the film, giving the audience an emotional spectator.
After the aforementioned discovery there are no macho heroics; Pharaon reacts on an emotional level unseen in films of this nature, running back to his car, tears streaming down his face, lost in a kind of detached melancholy that continues throughout the film.Over the course of the film, the narrative continues to unfold at a slow and deliberate pace, though we quickly realise that the real detective story at hand is not necessarily about the murder of the child, but more importantly, what has happened to make Pharaon the way he is.
This gives the film a greater degree of realism, though may be a little tiresome for viewers weaned on a more westernised approach to cinema, with one hypnotic scene in particular finding our central protagonist tending his allotment for what seems like the best part of fifteen minutes.As the film continues to unfold, and the clues begin to add up, we realise that this isn't going to have a clear-cut, moralistic ending akin to a routine police/crime thriller.
With L'Humanité (1999), Dumont has attempted to create a stripped down, bare-naked form of ambient cinema, in which it is the little character details and passages of silence, broken only by shocking violence and mechanical sex, that go towards creating the story.The ending of the film continues in this same vein and acts as a sort of shocking epiphany, in which every action and subtle line of dialog that has occurred during the epic running time is suddenly given a whole new meaning.
This film is a challenging experience, and if you are used to the rhythms of television, to being stimulated by action and spectacle or you spend a good deal of time with video games, this film will drive you crazy; it's slow, sometimes maddeningly tedious, and the main character is far from heroic, in the usual sense.This is a film about people trapped by their own situation, by their experiences, by their environment, by their weaknesses--these are the folks you often see on the streets and wonder what their lives might be like; Director Dumont is not interested in entertaining you, but, I think, wants you to think about your own values, about how you react to other people.Insensitive viewers who are after the usual action popcorn movie, or with little empathetic response will probably dislike this film, as it is about the inner self, or the lack of it; moviegoers who want a challenge, a film unlike any other, might find this journey fascinating--but it does demand that you put aside your previous cinematic expectations..
At a time when most films are content with simply bullying a reaction out of the viewer, along comes Bruno Dumont's 'L' Humanité', an unrelentingly grim detective story that has the rare power to get right under the viewer's skin from almost the first frame, engrossing the audience in a plot that is both repulsive, yet dangerously enthralling.
Omitting the usual genre clichés, 'L' Humanité' instead chooses to look at the ideas of loss, self-loathing, obsession and forgiveness, viewed through the eyes of a central character who would seem to be an almost inept amalgamation of contradictionsFrom the outset Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) seems to us, almost childlike, and certainly not somebody who should be in charge of a serious murder investigation.
It is the same with the other cast members, they don't seem like they're playing a part but actually living it.This of course gives the film a realism that makes the proceedings at times hard to watch.
The atmosphere of misery and pain amongst these characters sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of the viewing, and Dumont's use of uncompromising sexual imagery means that 'L' Humanité' is a film a lot of people will have a problem with.
"the Life of Jesus" (1997), Bruno Dumont's previous movie ended with the murder of an Arab teenager.
"Humanity" (1999) starts where "the Life of Jesus" ended: with the rape and the murder of a little girl in the same small town: Bailleul.
Then, to plunge more on the contents of the film and for a better understanding of it, let's write Dumont's words about the main reason which incited him to shot this gem: "I wanted to make a movie that would deal with the love of humanity while bearing in mind the reality which is grievous".
The main character, Pharaon, has suffered a loss of his wife and child in the pre-film past.
His best friends Joseph and Domino are not much more, their relationship based on sex (this film perhaps gives new meaning to the phrase "gratuitous sex"); Domino and Pharaon's mother are the two characters who display some emotion, but not much.
His name is Detective Pharaon de Winter, and he has a job to do.In this opening sequence, director Bruno Dumont sets up a dichotomy which runs throughout "Le Humanite": that of a character seeking to latch onto some modicum of humanity, of divinity, of spiritual uplift, whilst being continuously pulled back down by the material weight of the world.
The film's single moment of hope.9/10 - Like Robert Bresson, Dumont uses non-professional actors, and captures a kind of matter-of-fact transcendentality within our ordinary material world.
The story revolves around the murder of a young girl, and the main character, Pharaon De Winter, is a policeman investigating the killing, but L'Humanité is no murder mystery.
There isn't much happening in this film; it consists mainly of shots where the three main characters do boring things in a boring little French town.
This is the true strength of the film: it's ability to show us the feelings and emotions hiding beneath the most mundane of situations.Another strength of L'Humanité is the character of Pharaon.
Pharaon is present in almost every scene of the film, and although this makes us get quite bored of him, when the movie ends we still kind of miss him because we have grown so used to his persona and his mannerisms.
Its basic plot, the investigation into the rape and murder of a young girl, would suggest it is a thriller but this film is about it's characters first and foremost.Our hero Pharon is a policeman who lives at home with his mother He has suffered the loss of his wife and child, how we never find out.