chaos-rampant
This is one half of a great film, which makes it all the more frustrating in the end. Life is interminable and drab, faces are sullen, love is carnal touch, work is thankless routine, and there is something inexplicably wrong with the world, a shadow that moves and covers the sun. The film begins with a man lying down in the fields as if to die and transcend, but something calls him back; a horrible crime has been committed. (he is the police superintendent of a small town)The notion is that something is wrong with the man, a good-natured but childlike individual. We go on to find that he had a woman and baby, and lost both—we never know how. There is just the loss. The violence. The memory of an earlier, brighter life. The new crime has been committed against a young girl, raped and killed in the fields. The memory of the girl (both girls lost) is carried in the paintings of his painter grandfather, in particular one that depicts a young girl in the countryside.As in Haneke, at the core of it is the faint hum of something wrong in the cosmic mechanism, something broken.There is a pretty great scene that explains this. The superintendent has crossed the channel to England to question passengers of a train who may have seen something the day of the murder. Sure enough, they did see a man and girl that day, which only confirms what we know. But nothing of actual help beyond simple appearances that would explain deeper; the train was moving too fast, they can't be sure. And that is followed by our guy peering down below in the airport parking lot, where a fight has broken out—again the puzzling violence, but helpless to know or do anything about it.But that is all—relatively simple. Oh, there is a lot of wandering about streets and idly lounging on front steps, there is pretentious provocation in exposed vaginal shots. Some coarse, everyday sex. All that is neither here nor there. There are the scenes of him watering plants and looking out to the fields, cultivating life as he bides his time. It's a fine film, but dangerously close at times to affectation, it is composed after all as something between spontaneous sketches of life, and self-enclosed painterly reduction.Dumont does it better than most, to be sure. But as the case nears completion, and more and more time flows like a painter pours his paints, simply because there is room left for it, it becomes apparent that this could have been more.
tieman64
He races across the landscape, determined to climb a hill. He wants height, ascension, but is doomed to failure. Cut to close ups of feet, the man's once frenetic pace thwarted by a now muddy earth. He collapses, his palms and knees sinking into the mire. We watch for long moments as the man lays there, motionless in the mud. Gravity seems to be taking its toll, the earth's pull tugging at his bones, the mud consuming him, sucking him into the filth, swallowing him whole until...He pulls himself up. 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. As we will see, this tug-of-war between the corporeal and the celestian is never resolved. Pharaon then walks up to his car, pulls himself in, starts the engine and...stops. He is not your ordinary police detective. Played by Emmanuel Schotté, a non professional actor with a brilliantly expressive face, Pharaon is a man profoundly wounded. Having lost his family years ago – an event which triggered an ontological shock – Pharaon navigates this film with the wide eyes of a sad child. He sees an "abomination" in everything. As such, Pharaon wants to run away. A little girl returning home from school has been raped, her dead body found. It is Pharaon's duty as a detective to appear at the crime scene. But how can he? Instead he starts his car radio and listens to some orchestral music, its divine sounds lulling him, like the hill, into a moment of security. His car radio then warbles. "I'm on my way," he unconvincingly tells the dispatcher. Already we know this is not your regular cop movie. Every gesture, every action, is a chore.The girl's corpse is horrific. Dumont's camera lingers on her bloody vagina, torn open, shredded and graphically shown. These images haunt the entire film, the film's cast weighed down, traumatised and sickened by what we ourselves have now seen. The girl's body is itself arranged to resemble "Étant donnés", a famous painting by Marcel Duchamp. Pharaon de Winter is also the name of a famous 19th century painter who resolved to show his audience the fourth dimension. What our hero sees is only suffering.In most cop movies, the corpse is "revived" by the hustle and the bustle of detectives, photographers and onlookers. But Dumont does the opposite. Not only does his tranquil crime scene suggest a total absence of life, but the police procedural that follows – despite the girl's murder ultimately (seemingly) being solved – suggests the impossibility for closure. This is the reality Pharaon already understands: solving the murder will not solve the problem of the girl's murder. Inhumanity is in humanity and humanity can not be solved.What then is the role of the police officer? To what ends does he exist? Pharaon not only seems incapable of believing in himself as a cop, but revokes his role as a man of action and/or pursuit in favour for passive observation. He is disposed against his job and what little he does is tinged with a sense of supreme hopelessness.For forty minutes the film radically ignores its murder plot. Instead, we watch as Pharaon goes about various daily routines. He talks with his neighbour Domino (her name suggesting dual identities), is shown to play the piano to drown out the "noise" of TV violence, and is shown to have contempt for Joseph, the lover of Domino, who Pharaon views as being a vulgar, child-hating, xenophobic, violent, brute. While Joseph embodies man's capacity for barbarity, a barbarity Pharon does not believe can be put right, his "nature" may itself only exist in Pharon's mind; a product of the cop's jealousies. Conversely, Joseph may be like most violence: in plain sight, obvious, but denied thanks to shared, mass denial. Regardless, Joseph's "normal" romantic relationship with Domino is shown to be base and animalistic, the film blurring the lines between love, sex, kindness and dark opportunism. Domino is herself a dehumanised factory worker (she makes paint – symbolically covering things up), futilely dreaming of striking against the unfair employers who habitually psychically rape her. When she offers her body to Pharaon, he rejects her outright. He will not be another abuser.Eventually Pharaon starts investigating the murder, but it's a slow affair. He spends most of his time gazing longingly at the heavens, dreaming of levitating or lovingly kissing/hugging criminals. He also tends to a vegetable allotment. With everyone in the film living in cramped, impersonal houses, this allotment is one of the few positive outlets in the film; a means of nurturing, creation and indeed action itself.When the criminal is eventually found, Pharaon kisses the man on his lips. A motherly gesture, Pharon wants to make things right, sooth the criminal, tease out some goodness, perhaps even take away the criminal's sins. But we're not even sure if the criminal is in fact the criminal. He exists in a more metaphysical space: he is everyone's neighbour.Last shot: Pharaon sitting in the criminal's chair, handcuffed. He wants to be in the man's shoes, wants to find some glimmer of humanity, some semblance of goodness. He then looks out a window and up into the heavens and smiles. He's recalling an earlier moment. 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. For both directors, "spirit" infuses everything, the corporeal and the "spiritual" continually clash, and plot is told through elliptical, elusive moments.
Claudio Carvalho
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. Pharaon lives with his mother, and spends most of his leisure time with his neighbor Domino (Séverine Caneele) and her fiancé Joseph (Phileppe Tullier). Pharaon feels a kind of platonic love with Domino. The police department staff is being pressed by Lille and Paris to solve the crime and a strike of the workers of a factory. This French low budget movie is developed in a too slow pace and has very human characters. I liked it a lot, but I recognize that audiences only used to watch American movies will not like 'L' Humanité'. In Hollywood, this 142 minutes running time film would be an American 30 minutes short story. But lovers of cinema as art will certainly appreciate this simple but well directed story. 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. I did not understand the kiss of Pharaon in the lips of Joseph in the end of the story. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): 'A Humanidade' ('The Humanity')
