Pusan Film Festival Reviews 3: Flanders (Bruno Dumont) Dumont provides the downer of the festival, as three rural farm fellows sign up to go to war in an unnamed Muslim country. Back at home the town slut pines over the two she was having sex with, and eventually has a mental breakdown. Thousands of miles away the boys find their squad decimated and the survivors drifting around the desert, raping local women, looting, and shooting kids. It all makes one wonder what Dumont is getting at - the director has a background in philosophy but chooses to center his films on inarticulate neanderthal types, but to illustrate what? The film is certainly powerful, and Dumont can pull a great tour de force, but there's a deep strain of nihilism that runs through each of his films that I find distasteful. The director draws parallels between life on the farm, where a couple of the lads have a turn rutting the pretty local girl who unflinchingly gives herself to them, and their war outpost, where they drag a woman out of her house and take turns with her in a kind of redneck hoo-rah. But Dumont is almost comically lacking in any kind of warmth, good graces, or humor, and his relentlessly bleak view of an animalistic humanity gets to be too much. At least "The Optimists" made me laugh.
