User reviews

It's clear from other reviews that more or less everybody is agreed about the director's rather tricksy film-making and the lack of conventional narrative drive. It's just a question of whether you think these things make for a good film or a bad film.

For me, the good outweighs the bad: the deliberately non-emotional characterization, slow pace, and powerful use of landscape push viewers out of their comfort zone, and force us to confront some pretty basic realities about life and war.

It's the parallels - not the contrasts - between home life and the war that are most interesting. On many occasions, the film seems to have a deliberately timeless, ahistorical feel, so that the characters feel tremendously elemental (the word medieval springs to mind too) in their behaviours and concerns. Despite a slight lack of coherence (not necessarily in the plot, more in the overall conception), we do genuinely somehow care for the characters - quite an achievement given the overall tone of the movie.

The use of Flanders as the setting and title reinforces this sense of historical continuity, of war recurring down through the ages - not for nothing is the region known as "the cockpit of Europe". And by the way, a big chunk of historical Flanders is now in France (the French-plated cars, with "59" indicating the North department which includes most of French Flanders, are a giveaway). French Flanders is by definition not in Belgium, as one reviewer has suggested. However, one of the female characters (Barbe's friend) appears to have a strong Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking) accent - a nice touch, and not entirely implausible in this border region, where a few people still speak Flemish on the French side of the border (visit Hondschoote, and you'll see what I mean).

This film should make everybody rethink their approach to war, and the impact of sending young men (and women, although not in this film) from more or less every generation off to fight and die (remember that Flanders was scarred by war twice in a lifetime in the 20th century). Not necessarily a particularly easy watch on the face of it, but a powerful and worthwhile one.

What is surprising in this film is the way the director uses a very simple minimalistic style of telling a story to cope with one of the most important themes of the contemporary world - the involvement of the young people in Western countries in wars that happen in the third world. This is the story of two young men from some rural place in Northern France or French speaking Belgium who are sexually involved with the same girl before being sent to fight a war in a remote Islamic country. The girl has her own mental problems and has an abortion while the young men face all possible horrors of war, face death, commit and are subjected to unimaginable violence. All is told in very simple, well filmed and clear images, and this creates a strong emotional impact. With simple cinematographic tools the director sends a message of distress and pain about the conflicts human beings are subjected to in the world today. Worth watching.

It's remarkable that this film is not more popular. It successfully strips away the veneer of "civilisation" (false morality, good manners etc) and shows people as selfish, brutal animals, and depicts modern, asymmetrical warfare as a terrible nightmare where a group of brutish white thugs rape and murder a terrified, technologically backward society (nearly all of whom are defenceless/ poorly armed women and children) before finally being made to suffer a grim but deserved humiliation for their actions. Oh, actually, what am I saying? It'll be a bloody surprise if it ever comes out in North America properly, given the hypocritical, righteous atmosphere of self-delusion that currently permeates this society, a society underpinned by exactly the kind of abuse and violence that this film describes.

Flandres is a depiction of what happens when simple people are placed into complicated situations; it is a quite shocking, although stirring, war-set drama which is more about the tragedy of how human beings can slump to the depths we're able than it is about the tragedy of war itself. The folk in the film are unassuming, uncreative and with little to say nor do during their days in an undetermined, mostly rural, French speaking nation; the sorts of scenarios they eventually come to find themselves in are very much the opposite – the film playing out like a perverse circus of what happens when a test gerbil is placed in an environment it has little-to-no-hope of conquering, and all for our viewing displeasure as we sit back and witness the experiment.

People in Flandres make love without emotion; they live life without empathy; and find it difficult to react to levels of deplorable violence. It is to this extent that Bruno Dumont's film is more a burning, nihilistic drama than a war film per se; a film that weeps for mankind, a film depicting a desensitisation that the species has for love; violence; fellow man and attitudes towards life. The film follows a young man named André (Boidin), an ugly man; a simple man, a farmer in the wooded plains of what could be France; what might be Belgium or what might even be somewhere as seemingly disassociated and arbitrary as Luxembourg. Farm life is routine: it snows in the winter and a lot of walking is generally required in a zone cut off from urbanised living. These people, other farmers and the young females living in close proximity, rarely speak with whatever communication required between them done so via glances and meagre actions. Since there is nary an awful lot that needs getting done in the first place, it is all that these people need to amass in their communication in order to get things done. So rarely do things happen in the lives of these people that a crude, seemingly random, sexual relationship between André and young Barbe (Leroux) strikes us as almost illegitimate.

It is on one of these days that one of André's few friends relays to him that he will be going off to war in the near future. In their leaning up against a barn wall, while appearing to systematically stare off into the distance beyond a nearby gate at what's beyond, we sense that this might very well be a jump for this character greater than it might be for others: nary do these people treads beyond into the wider unknown and what has just been spoken of would be a drastic change. Sure enough, Dumont's cut from the ice cold European territory to the flat, arid deserts of this unspecified place engulfed in a war between Europeans and Arabs is the sort of jump in composition that can only emphasise this.

André has clambered aboard in the drafting process, the idea that where they're headed is the unknown and the ambiguity surrounding what the war is for, as well as you might say the specific name of the country, is supposed to encapsulate most of what's going on in the Middle East, as Caucasians from most nations vie with locals in a place of which they've probably not previously heard for surface means of which they think they're aware. Trying to work out where exactly the warzone is acts as a pleasing distraction once all the war-set nastiness kicks off; where the clear inflection is Iraq or Afghanistan, Dumont appears to tie in the jungles of somewhere like North Korea to add to the idea this foreign war might just as well be anywhere. The wartime sequences are as harrowing as any from most war films, while the film itself is often constructed as if not even a war film in the first place but some sort of survival horror piece wherein folk have wondered into a Hellish bloodbath where one can only (how did Mr. Blonde put it in Reservoir Dogs?) "Pray for a quick death you aren't going to get".

Dumont doffs his cap to the likes of Full Metal Jacket with a sequence involving a sniper, a confrontation which eventually leads onto the encountering of a child soldier and the nastiness which comes with that. His greatest achievement, however, is how he constructs this idea of life on the homestead and life at war being more intrinsically linked than one might think - principally, the merciless disregard for young life in the executing of these child soldiers as well as the domestic termination of an unborn as well as the desire to instigate casual sexual intercourse with the women of where one happens to find one's self. This whole idea of white Western men, few of whom are bright in the first place, arriving on the shores of what is otherwise a stark change in climate and way of life in the form of a foreign country, before instigating their attitudes and ways of life upon what's around them, also feels apparent if not the primary focus. With a steady eye for agonised detail, Flandres is the painful piece of cinema I wasn't expecting heading in – its topical nature combined with its grizzled aesthetic demonstrates a real talent at work while the experience as a whole stays with you for some considerable time, all of which adds up to something worth tracking down.

Whether you like the films of Bruno Dumont or not, one thing is certain - you never forget them. Films such as La Vie de Jesus and L'Humanité have an elemental power that challenge us to confront the sickness of the soul that comes from denying our capacity to be and act human. Dumont's latest film Flanders, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2006, has the same acute powers of observation, slow and careful revelation of character, and insight into the human condition that characterized his first two films. Like La Vie de Jesus, Flanders is a film that deals with sexual and racial tension and marginal young people whose lives mirror the emptiness of the rural countryside in which the film is set.

The first two words of the film are the "f" word and the "s" word, which set the tone for what is to follow. Demester (Samuel Boidin), a burly local works on a farm and is having a passionless relationship with Barbe (Adélaide Leroux), a girl from a neighboring farm. True to Dumont's oeuvre, sex is joyless and mechanical and neither partner expresses affection. There is little dialogue and no musical score, only sounds of nature, the clumping of boots through the forest, and the grunting and pumping that suggest the sex act. The expressions on the faces of the characters are as vacant as the surrounding countryside and no director in the world can better convey a sense of pervasive emptiness than Bruno Dumont.

At a local pub, Demester matter-of-factly denies that he and Barbe are a couple, prompting Barbe to react by going off with a stranger, Blondel (Henri Cretel) to have sex and it soon becomes apparent that she has a reputation in the village for promiscuity. Demester and Blondel's fate will intertwine however. Both are in the same regiment called up to fight an unnamed war in a distant country that looks like the North Africa of Claire Denis'Beau Travail. It is not clear if the fighting is meant to reflect the War in Iraq, the French adventure in Algeria, or perhaps a European war yet to be fought. When the soldiers arrive they walk through a trench, possibly a vision of World War I in Flanders field, immortalized in the poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.

Dumont shows us war in its ultimate depravity including rape, murder of children, castration, and other brutalities. It is as if years of the soldier's sexual tensions and lack of emotional connection has exploded in a callous way, reflective of the torture of Iraqi's at Abu Ghraib. As his buddies die one by one at the hands of dark-skinned guerilla fighters, it becomes obvious that Demester will not lift a finger to save or protect them, a witness to his inability to access what FDR used to call, "that quiet, invisible thing called conscience". As the guerilla fighting in the streets and houses intensify, there is a war going on at home also. Barbe becomes pregnant and has a mental breakdown that lands her in a psychiatric hospital. Soon the war will be fought on two fronts.

Flanders has been called an anti-war film but the war seems to take place mostly on an internal level. It is expressionistic and poetic, a film that unfolds as if in a dreamscape that has no past, present, or future. You cannot appreciate Flanders by thinking about it, but only by feeling it, viscerally, in your blood. After showing mankind at its most vile in order to, in the director's own words, "relieve us of those urges", Dumont grants us a catharsis. Like unemployed, uneducated, and epileptic 20-year old Freddy in La Vie de Jesus whose vision of the sun after a brutal murder heralded an awakening, in his barn after the war's end, Demester recognizes the truth of the gaping wounds in his own soul and opens himself to the possibility of grace.

The story of a nymphomaniac and three of her friends who go to war. They live in a rural area and the young men are farmhands.

Weak dramatic construction and execution makes this an unsatisfactory narrative. One could put a positive spin by stressing the contrast made between the muddy, limited and mundane life of the farm with the dirty and savage moments of war zones. One could also call attention to the parallels between the minor moral transgressions of civilian life and the moral outrages perpetrated by combatants during an armed conflict. But even this alternative viewing superimposes itself poorly on the narrative structure.

I'm not sure how "Flanders" came to my attention but I am certainly glad that I had the opportunity to see it and I intend to seek out more of director Dumont's work. The film takes a cold hard look at nature of humanity, love, and war. The work of Bresson and his effective use of non-professional actors came to mind for me.

War is brutal. People are capable of doing very bad things in the name of love and war as this film so well demonstrates. I was disgusted by "Blackhawk Down" when it was released to feed the blood lust in the run up to the war in Iraq. I found Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" dishonest. The pro war message of that film was much stronger than any anti war theme it presented. If the old and wealthy had to fight wars instead of the young there would be a hell of a lot fewer wars.

Dumont's view of humanity is not very positive nor is his view of war. People are not very caring and are capable of evil. Sending people to kill others is not a glorious thing. I'm tired of being told "war is hell" and that things like the killing of women and children and the torture and killing of POWs is the cost of doing war and has always been done.

The characters in "Flanders" seem appropriately dead to their own existence and that of others. Dumont's visuals add to the sense of a brutal, inhospitable world. His is an effective and affectless view of the world as I experience it as a kind of a horror show. I recently heard a statistic that in addition to the 54,000 soldiers we lost in combat in Vietnam 200,000 veterans have committed suicide. I'm not sure how accurate that is but the stories I am hearing about the physical, psychological, and mental trauma to the troops returning from Iraq makes war seem a luxury humankind cannot afford. I am grateful that for this work by Bruno Dumont. It is not an easy film to watch but it is, I think, an important one.

Bruno Dumont seems to have an obsession for depicting his fellow French citizens in some pretty dark & dismal situations. Thankfully, this makes for some edgy,concise drama. Although I walked away major disappointed with the last film of his I saw (The Twenty Nine Palms), this made up for it in spades. The plot concerns the tentative relation ship between a farm hand (Samuel Boidin),and the local town slut (Adelaide Leroux),who's screwing everybody in the local phone book. Andre has been called to the Army to fight in a war in a non specific area (Iraq?). Andre soon finds out about the hell that is war,while Barbe deals with her own demons. If you've ever seen any of Dumont's other films will know that he doesn't make things easy for his audiences (sex that is depicted in his films is generally unerotic,if not downright ugly to watch,plus violence is never approached with restraint). If you've managed to make it this far, 'Flandres',although unpleasant to watch,is none the less,a film well worth checking out.

In a grey and uncharming part of France, these farming people live. Life is quiet. You start a relation with the girl in the neighbor house. Life would have remained quiet if it wasn't for war. Or...? There's a shocking contrast here, between the silent life and the brutal battles in Africa. It directly affects also life at home, in an almost as brutal way. Can the things we've done, those wounds, be healed? Maybe they can after all.

A very tense drama, which is sometimes hard to watch. Well acted, and very far from mainstream action, especially when it comes to psychological violence.

No, really. I have no idea how I managed to watch this thing to the end, but the only advice I can give you is: by all means, do not waste an hour and a half of your life watching this. I seriously don't know where to start with what's wrong with this title, maybe because there's nothing really right about it, save for one single subplot set...in a war, either in Afghanistan or Iraq (see, we don't know which war it is), involving Belgian soldiers and a female enemy combatant. Otherwise this 'movie' is a mess of randomly thrown in characters (you'll find yourself thinking 'who the hell is this?' all the time if you gather enough courage to watch the movie), pretentious artsy directing (close-up of a face followed by a wide angle shot of the landscape...throughout the WHOLE movie), a practically non-existing plot (there's three changes of settings, neither of which makes sense because we never learn anything about the characters or their motivations, or their personal stories), practically non-existing dialogs, or communication for that matter that I guess was meant to be part of Dumont's vision but just adds up to a big pile of nonsense (yeah...there's a whole lot of staring-thoughtfully-into-the-distant landscape in Flanders, especially at the scene where they're hanging out in the field). Now from a technical point of view, whoever recorded and mixed the sound probably won't find another production to work on in the next 20 years. Also, I thought about it real hard, but I couldn't come up with a rational explanation as to why the producers thought it would be a good idea not to have ANY music in this film. Especially given the fact that there's a huge gap created by the severe lack of dialog in there. Moreover...since when do Flemish people speak French? This would cause a riot in Flanders. And how is it that a bunch of soldiers are left on their own in Iraq/Afghanistan, without any supervision or contact with their base and/or commanders? Where are the PEOPLE? Military operations are conducted in strategic spots (e.g. populated areas)...so why do we have one bad guy popping randomly out of nowhere every once in a while? And the military using horses alongside tanks and Hummers? You can't be serious. Apparently, Dumont wanted to depict an ultra-realistic image of humanity, but realism does not equal incoherence.

Do not waste your time on this.

Bruno Dumont seems to create controversy in every one of his films, but I've only seen "Flandres" and "L'Humanite. " Dumont's film language is very bleak and very stark. He uses little to no soundtrack music, letting ambient sound to substitute. His characters seem to writhe in a painfully prosaic film world, their experiences and torments more vivid for the lack of melodrama.

Demeste (Samuel Boidin) and Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) have a complicated romantic relationship in a rural farming village somewhere in Francophone Europe. Barbe is promiscuous with other men, yet Demeste seems to permit the trysts without comment. You only see his brooding glares. All the young men in the area enlist to go off for war somewhere in an Arab desert. They young soldiers take their emotional baggage with them into this hostile environment. There are fistfights in the camp, firefights in the field, and no one understands the language or mannerisms of the locals. Inevitably, acts of war become acts of war crimes. Seemly normal guys go off to war and become brutal Neanderthals murdering, molesting and bailing. The survivors, like all survivors, are left to try and understand what happened and what they've become.

Bruno Dumont is back in form here with his fourth release (I found the plot of his previous "Twentynine Palms" to be flawed). Any of you who saw 'The Life of Jesus'('97) and/or 'Humanity'('99) can expect much of the same in terms of style; and to a certain extent, themes as well. This is by no means an easy film to watch (the war scenes, shot in Tunisia, are, at times, just dreadful). And even the storyline which takes place in Flandres, in the north of France (where Dumont is from, and his first two films are set), is full of emotional pain. A very French film, but not of the condescending, intellectual sort, but rather of the realistic, naturalistic, and yes, minimalistic variety. To be seen on the big screen for full effect.

It's funny: a previous entry suggests a turn to Carlos Reygadas (over Dumont); the fact is that Reygadas is obviously borrowing from Dumont in his latest Silent Night. Make no mistake though, Dumont IS the original.

There isn't a more progressive, uncompromising, audacious filmmaker working in the world of cinema today. And you should be very cautious when you run into someone who puts down his work so angrily. These people have serious political motivations in criticizing Dumont's approach, just like I have serious political motivations in defending him. But if you don't see the humanist tone to his films and you're only aware of the misery and depredation, then you're not looking at the film properly or you have very little humanism in you to begin with.

I know that might sound harsh, but it must be stated, frankly.

I know for sure that Dumont's work gives a lot of hope to socially responsible artists and filmmakers. In the end he's just picking up on a legacy of bold, realistic film-making that was abandoned by the Americans in the seventies (read: What ever happened to the progressive independent American Cinema?).

See all his films open minded, and your world view will be challenged in a way that it hasn't before.

Bruno Dumont has a good command of elegant filmmaking ("Humanite" and the early parts of "Flanders" are testimonies of this fact). However, I find his extremely twisted screenplays to drive home his view of life disconcerting. In "Flanders," it is French male soldiers (who are deprived of sex for a while) raping a female enemy soldier on battle lines and events that follow, which are related to that incident. Can Dumont write a screenplay devoid of sex, rape, killings, and their aftermath? In "France" (2022), he showed that he could. I have seen four of Dumont's films and they seem to be variants of the same theme in different locales and circumstances. I look forward to future Dumont films that are more like like "Humanite" and "France."

This film is about a group of young men going off to war. In this far away land, they leave marks to themselves and to the enemies by their lack of morality.

I guess I have to be in a certain mood to enjoy this film. It is highly minimalistic, as it has no soundtrack or extravagant sets. The pacing is extremely slow. It basically features people walking around half the time (and I am very serious), with occasional highly disturbing scenes interspersed in the second half of the film. There is very little dialog in it, and many dramatic scenes are very minimally delivered. For example, the helicopter rescue scene, it could have been made a real drama and thriller but it was so minimal. Flandres could have been a moving tale of morality, but instead tested my endurance.

This movie should be reclassified as a snuff film for misogynists and sociopaths. There are more "sex" scenes in this movie than anything else and the war sequences are nothing but a reflection of the testicular born barbarism that young men display during times of war. The unfortunate truth is that this movie does display the type of behavior the patriotic of our world view as " heroic" and "sacrificial". Those of us that view murdering and raping people trying to survive the onslaught of allied forces as a noble cause will cherish this movie as it aptly depicts the cruel ability of humans to rationalize even the most aberrant and violent behavior. If you're really dying to watch a movie where virtually ever single character is devoid of morality, indulge yourself.