When an 11-year-old girl is brutally raped and murdered in a quiet French village, a police dectective who has forgotten how to feel emotions investigates the crime, which raises more questions than it answers. An ambitious mood piece that was a provocative winner of 3 awards at Cannes.
In L'Humanite, by Bruno Dumont, Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) is a Police Superintendent called upon to investigate the murder and rape of an 11-year old girl. ... more >
In L'Humanite, by Bruno Dumont, Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) is a Police Superintendent called upon to investigate the murder and rape of an 11-year old girl. Flaunting almost every cinematic convention, the film is not about solving a crime but a 2 1/2-hour poem of mood, time, silence and spirit. Set in northern France in the director's hometown of Bailleul, the characters are unglamorous members of the working class. Dumont simply observes 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 bus-driver boyfriend Joseph (Philippe Tullier). He is an unlikely cop, a passive, stoop-shouldered, and empathetic man who would sooner kiss a prisoner on the lips or stroke his neck as browbeat him.
As the film opens, a man is walking in the distance alone across a grassy hill. Suddenly as the camera moves in for a close-up, he collapses in the mud and just lays there for a while. Is he dead or alive? Did he commit the crime? In the next scene, he is sitting in his car listening to harpsichord music and we discover that he is a policeman talking in a barely audible voice to his superior. L'Humanite is an involving and disturbing film that you cannot feel lukewarm about. It is profoundly moving with a conclusion as perplexing as the beginning with an ambiguous resolution.What I do know is that I felt as vitally alive watching this film. L'Humanite continually forces us to question what we are looking at and, as the title suggests, keeps bringing us closer and closer to the core of what makes us truly human.
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