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They are raped. Kill. They miss. Silent. They look at one point for a long time. They constantly eat something, or rather - chew. They drive aimlessly on cars, motorcycles, bicycles. Raise clouds of dust. They copulate noisily, frantically: "Still! Still!" - "I finish !!!"

The film Bruno Dumon " 29 palm trees " is built on non-stop movement, including genre: begins like a row-muvi (the heroes go to the town of twenty-nine palm trees), continues with a melodrama (David and Katya are passionately loved by a thriller (bandits, presumably from the Russian past Katya, are raped by David, David, David Katya kills and dies himself). In other words, "29 palm trees" - the text of the pothole, broken and aimless trajectory of trips, copulations, hysterical pulsations. Devices/surfaces for recording and registering what is happening are the bodies of the heroes, and the Earth is the space in which the acts of the letter are made. On arable lands, wastelands, in semi -deserts, the heroes fly in their cars, they are there after the denouement. Fields do not give rest to the eyes, rather, they are fraught with a threat. Savannah "29 palm trees" literally spits out this threat in the form of a jeep with bandits. In the debut of Dumon's “ Jesus Life ”, a small -town punny kills Arab on the suburban highway, in the “ humanity ” noted in the Cannes among farm allotments, the girl was raped and killed. When the hero is working out his own, he is simply dropped into a landscape - devastated, like Fredi from the "life of Jesus", or raped and naked, like David.

Thus, the “29 palm” space works exclusively on creating a sense of danger, and therefore looks unfriendly, removed meager, unrestrained, long monotonous plans, with a complete loss of rhythm. The action, respectively, is tied to small towns with empty streets turning into the fields; Boring provincial hell as an ideal place of crime and fear. The space, plump and visually sterilized, does not carry any other functions of means. At the intersection, overcoming borders, or rather - in their absence, Dumon insists. Therefore, the crime occurs quite logically - after all, in fact, there is nothing, and everyone can be a criminal.

Leveling the conflict -forming and visual potential of one of the most important cinematic "attractions" - space, Dumon does not stop there. The second object of removal is speech. A laconication reigns on the screen, and this is not a significant silence in which the words give way to the visual language, because the space of the frame is "silent" too. The heroes simply have nothing to talk about: “A good bicycle. - Yes. - It’s good to ride it. The weather is excellent. - Yes. - In this weather, it’s good to ride” (“humanity”). Words do not matter - as something too human. Says the body. Consequently, any communication is built through physical contact - hug, kiss, beating, rape, murder. A person consists of saliva, hip, belching, urine, evaporates, stench. In the "life of Jesus" and "29 palm trees", "love" is added to the list, that is, mating - apparently, a particularly disgusting function of the body.

Sex is a tragedy and a curse. It does not serve the reproduction or pleasure, but it is intended to identify the animal essence of the copulating ones. Its details are obscene, or even sickening. Even the lighting in bed scenes asxual, the bodies are unattractive, pale, it is not clear that they are attracted to each other. The old woman, a corpse, a raped girl will be shown - large and naked. Lovers are demonstrated in the least profitable angles, mainly from the back, sometimes from the side, in the "29 palm trees" in the first moments it is generally impossible to understand what David and Katya do. Each scene of intercourse is built as an action of repulsion, mutual bitterness and brutality. The only thing that can combine these people is an unkind, dirty instinct. Passion is a barren machine, a schizoid mechanism that operates in idle mode, fixing desires on the human body with the help of another body. A possible substantiation of such an attitude could be latent homoerotism, another of the through motives of Dumon. However, in "29 palm trees" the denouement is precisely homosexual rape. David kills Katya not due to the awareness of his hidden side, by no means - it looks like a revenge for the loss of power in the pride.

However, it is quite difficult to understand motivations here. The heroes of Dumon films are initially represented closed, tightly fastened, stacked. 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. A person, according to Dumon, is an ugly animal, and the director does everything so that this ugrassot and animal nature are visible. Therefore, the question is not so important, professionals or amateurs play, because there is nothing like the game and close. From the actors, in this case, Katya Golubeva and David Vissak, it is only necessary to be an application to the car of the flesh, which, stammering and grinding, drags the film on itself; Be no - and they are really none. Behind the surface of the faces, indifferent, crying or distorted by passion, imprinted with a sluggishly moving camera - the emptiness is mental, psychological, emotional. Idling. Damage mode. Waiting for use is in other people's interests. Neither right nor guilty. The line between the criminal and the victim is thinner to complete disappearance, David is raped in the same way, with the same screams, roar and tears that accompanied the entire chain of his compounds with Katya.

So, the visual, psychological, existential, ultimately, semantic series "29 palm trees" is minimized. This is truly meager, or rather, impoverished, cinema. The text written by the flesh is even the text of more than one line or one word - but by registering a lingering howl, a monotonous line of human substitution, the depth of the surface, the author’s and the original - erased to indiligence. As a result, instead of the text, the dashed of unreasonably stretched voids and pauses, common places and stamps (spontaneous cruelty and moral relativism, a frozen discolored landscape and eliminated physiology - examples can be multiplied). And here, completely unexpectedly, I recall the diametrically distant Hollywood.

Let the A-class attractions work varied and continuously, and Dumon’s bodily machines are weaving somehow, breaking and encountering. The antagonists converge in their a priori secondary, in support of straightforward violence, in neglect of visuality as the primary history of screen art and, ultimately, in meaningless cinema as such. The difference is perhaps in the number of spectators.

The result, alas, is the same.