Dmitry Desyaterik. Surrender

Capitulation
"29 Palms". Director - Bruno Dumont

Dmitry Desyateryk

Publication date: March 10, 2004

They are being forced. They kill. They are bored. They are silent. They stare at one point for a long time. They are constantly eating, or rather chewing, something. They drive cars, motorcycles, and bicycles aimlessly. Clouds of dust are raised. They copulate noisily, frantically: “More! More!” - "I'm cumming!!!"

Bruno Dumont's film " 29 Palms " is built on non-stop movement, including genre: it begins as a road movie (the heroes go to the town of Twenty-Nine Palms), continues with melodrama (David and Katya passionately love each other), ends with a thriller (bandits, presumably from Katya’s Russian past, David is raped, David kills Katya and dies himself). In other words, “29 Palms” is a text of a pothole, a broken and aimless trajectory of trips, copulations, hysterical pulsations. of the characters serve as devices/surfaces for recording and recording what is happening The bodies , and the space in which acts of writing are performed is the earth. In arable fields, wastelands, and semi-deserts, the heroes rush in their cars, and find themselves there after the end. The fields do not give rest to the eyes; rather, they conceal a threat. Savannah "29 Palms" literally spits out this threat in the form of a jeep with bandits. In the debut of Dumont's Life of Jesus "Small punks kill an Arab on a country highway; in the Cannes-listed " Humanity " a girl was raped and killed among farm plots. When the hero has done his job, he is simply thrown into the landscape - devastated, like Freddy from "The Life of Jesus", or raped and naked, like David.

Thus, the space of “29 Palms” works solely to create a feeling of danger, and therefore looks uninviting, shot sparingly, uninventively, with long, monotonous shots, with a complete loss of rhythm. The action, accordingly, is tied to small towns with empty streets turning into fields; boring provincial hell as an ideal place of crime and fear. The space, which is plottably and visually sterilized, does not carry any other signifying functions. Dumont insists on crossing, overcoming boundaries, or rather, their absence. Therefore, the crime occurs quite logically - after all, in essence, there is nothing to crime, and anyone can turn out to be a criminal.

Leveling the conflict-generating and visual potential of one of the most important cinematic “attractions” - space, Dumont does not stop there. The second object of removal is speech. There is laconicism on the screen, and this is not that significant silence in which words give way to visual language, because the space of the frame is also “silent”. The heroes simply have nothing to talk about: “It’s a good bike. - Yes. - It’s good to ride. The weather is great. - Yes. - It’s good to ride in this weather” (“Humanity”). Words have no meaning - as something too human. The body speaks. Consequently, any communication is built through physical contact - a hug, a kiss, a beating, rape, murder. A person consists of saliva, expectoration, belching, urine, perspiration, stench. In The Life of Jesus and 29 Palms, "love" is added to the list, that is, mating, which seems to be a particularly disgusting bodily function.

Sex is a tragedy and a curse. It does not serve reproduction or pleasure, but is intended to reveal the animal essence of those copulating. Its details are obscene, if not nauseating. Even the lighting in the sex scenes is asexual, the bodies are unattractive, pale, and it is unclear what attracts them to each other. An old woman, a corpse, a raped girl will definitely be shown - close up and naked. The lovers are shown in the least favorable angles, mainly from the back, sometimes from the side, in “29 Palms” in the first moments it is generally impossible to understand what David and Katya are doing. Each scene of intercourse is structured as an act of repulsion, mutual bitterness and brutality. The only thing that can unite these people is an unkind, dirty instinct. Passion is a sterile machine, a schizoid mechanism that functions in idle mode, fixing desires on the human body with the help of another body. A possible justification for such an attitude could be latent homoeroticism, another of Dumont’s cross-cutting motifs. However, in 29 Palms the denouement is precisely homosexual rape. The “lowered” David kills Katya not due to the awareness of his hidden side, not at all - it looks like revenge for the loss of power in the pride.

However, it is quite difficult to understand the motivations here. The heroes of Dumont's films initially appear closed, tightly buttoned, sealed. Perhaps they are driven by desire, or fear emanating from some secret in the past, or mental disorder, but at the level of performers this cannot be assumed for sure. Man, according to Dumont, is an ugly animal, and the director does everything to make this ugliness and bestiality visible. Therefore, the question of whether professionals or amateurs play is not so important, because there is nothing even close to the game. The actors, in this case Katya Golubeva and David Wissack, are only required to be an appendix to the machine of flesh that, stuttering and grinding, drags the film along; to be nothing - and they really are nothing. Behind the surface of faces, indifferent, crying or distorted by passion, captured by a sluggishly moving camera, there is a spiritual, psychological, emotional emptiness. Idling. Breakdown mode. Expectation of use is in the interests of others. Neither right nor wrong. The line between the criminal and the victim becomes thinner until it completely disappears; David is raped in exactly the same way, with the same screams, roars and tears that accompanied the entire chain of his connections with Katya.

So, the visual, psychological, existential, and ultimately the semantic series of “29 Palms” are reduced to a minimum. This is truly a meager, or rather impoverished, movie. A text written in flesh turns out to be not even a text of one line or one word - but a registration of a drawn-out howl, a monotonous line of substitution of the human for the animal, depth for the surface, the author's and the original - erased to the point of indistinction. As a result, instead of text, a dotted line of unreasonably extended voids and pauses, commonplaces and cliches appears (spontaneous cruelty and moral relativism, a frozen, discolored landscape and defamiliarized physiology - examples can be multiplied). And here, quite unexpectedly, the diametrically distant Hollywood comes to mind.

Let the A-class attractions work in a variety of ways and continuously, and let Dumont's bodily machines drag along somehow, breaking and colliding. The antagonists agree on their a priori secondary nature, their reliance on straightforward violence, their disregard for visuality as the fundamental basis of screen art and, ultimately, the meaninglessness of cinema as such. The only difference is the number of spectators.

The result, alas, is the same.