L’Humanité – 1999, Bruno Dumont

by Allan Fish

(France 1999 148m) DVD1/2

Life is really sick

p  Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Bréhat  d/w  Bruno Dumont  ph  Yves Cape  ed  Guy Lecorne  m  Richard Cuviller

Emmanuel Schotté (Pharaon de Winter), Séverine Caneele (Domino), Philippe Tullier (Joseph), Ghislain Ghesquère, Ginette Allegré, Darius, Arnaud Brejon de la Lavergnee, Daniel Petillon

An extreme long shot, a horizon in either the first light of dawn or at dusk.  A man emerges from trees to the left and is seen to run along the horizon.  We follow him over a wall and across some barren, unforgiving landscape that wouldn’t be out of place in a Brontë film.  He then falls to the earth, on his stomach, head turned to the left vaguely towards the camera.  His eye is wide open in a way not dissimilar to the dead Janet Leigh in Psycho.  He remains motionless, and for a few seconds we wonder whether he, too, is dead.  Then he moves.  We don’t know whether he was running from or to something.

Then another scene, an interior medium long shot.  The same man seated on a chair is largely faced away from the camera at approximately 120 degrees from the eye-line.  There’s a computer behind him, two windows either side.  We see that he’s wearing handcuffs.  Then cut to a medium close up of him staring vaguely as if past the camera to the world outside.

One scene opens L’Humanité, the second closes it.  In between we get the most bizarre police procedural you will ever see.  An 11 year old girl is raped and murdered and her body discovered by the local police.  But then we’re forced to put the murder to the back of our mind.  Another forty minutes pass until we begin to see the slightest trace of detection, and then it really is slight.  That computer in the office, if standing as a metaphor for the backward nature of policing in the north east of France (Dumont’s favourite desolate Pas-de-Calais country) then it may as well be switched off.  Forget subject profiling, DNA, cross-examination, even basic detection.  The methodology may just as well be to wait until the subject dies of old age.  This is the most inefficient police force since Will Hay left Turnbothamround, unable to find their own backside with Sat Nav, let alone a kiddy killer.

So come back to that forty minutes.  It’s a jolt to the system.  Like watching a Ripper movie, hearing the hue and cry of another body being found then having no mention of it at all while we watched Whitechapel residents go about their mundane business.  The detective protagonist, Pharaon, seems more interested in spending time with Domino, the woman living a few doors away who stands outside her house like a sentry watching the world go by.  Occasionally Pharaon reports in, or takes a trip on the Eurostar to London for the most pointless questioning you’ll ever see, or moves along protesters outside the Town Hall.

As always, Dumont’s characters lack all the pretence of movie heroes and heroines.  Beauty and conventional looks are eschewed, even plain common sense seems to be out of season.  Pharaon has the demeanour of a village idiot wandering the countryside in a daze, hugging everyone he meets.  We learn that he’s suffered tragedy in his past, but he’s still the most ill-fitting, dysfunctional, sociopathic cop you will ever see.

There are other faults.  Despite the Cannes awards, the actors are typically and at times painfully amateurish – aiming at Bressonian understatement but not coming close.  We just wish Pharaon would have a moment of release, like the one Denis Lavant had dancing to ‘Rhythm of the Night’ in Beau Travail.  Yet we know it would break the spell, and despite the glaring procedural inconsistences which endanger it becoming a parody, it does exert a firm hypnotic grip.  In retrospect the key scene seems to be not the famous levitation scene in the flower bed, but the scene in the art gallery.  It’s not so much the paintings as the way the paintings are arranged by the curator and by Dumont within his frame while Pharaon watches, silently.  That’s what he does, culture as voyeurism.

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