Marginals, Minimals and Misfits. Mavericks and Mystics. Thats who Bruno Dumont seems to like to make his films about. And quite possibly Mads and Mentally Ills.
This Boy is a very strange boy. Does odd and inexplicable things.
Also does criminal things, things outside the law, outside of sanity. And possibly outside of Satan also; meaning the kind of irrational acts that even Satan would struggle to find justification for evilly enacting.
Like shoot this goth girls abusive stepdad stone dead. As if he were out with his gun, casually taking a pot shot at an innocent deer.
And then whacking an unfortunate lad over the head because he dared to kiss the goth girl (who he seems to have little interest in being in possession of, our making his girlfriend).
And then sucking on the mouth of a possessed girl as if exorcising her demons.
He doesn’t appear to have any sexual or carnal interest in the goth girl..
Maybe he’s her good bad angel.
A backpacker has latched on to him and, inexplicably, wants to be fucked. She’s offering her naked body to his grunting body on a plate.
He fucks and throttles her almost to death. She starts foaming at the mouth.
Is that female ejaculation happening, but gushing out the wrong end? (or is she evicting his curdled cum out of her mouth?) Talk about a mind-blowing orgasm. Don’t think she’ll be wanting casual sex with strangers again in a hurry. Just asking for it she was. Asking to be punished.
The Boy is up to more of his funny business. Resurrects the goth girl back to life (after she’d been raped and murdered)
This film gets more and more banally ‘incroyable’, upping the ante on the credibility meter. It shouldn’t be taken too literally. Even if it has pretensions at being seriously parabolic. If not to say parodic (although I wouldn’t dare say that to Dumonts face. He might start making his malicious mischief with me)
The Boy, like all the other characters in the film, is a non-professional actor. Which is to say, he can’t, or doesn’t, act. He gets very few words of dialogue to act or emote. He just walks around the countryside with this stupid enigmatic grinny grimace on his blank face.
Thats him unconscionably, and consciencelessly, walking off, out of the village, and out of the film. Off to do more dirty derring do in the next God-forsaken hapless place that needs his horrible ‘help’.
What a casually, and vacuously, unpleasant film this has been. Mind you, unpleasant is sort par for the course for Bruno Dumont. He’s always wanting to give watchers of his films a nasty slap in the face, a brutal kick in the guts, a vicious knife in the goolies.
I just can’t be arsed to work out what all this quasi religious anti-hero mundane everyday everyman radicality is supposed to mean. Its a pseudo parable of ugly parobolic and phony horribolic distortions.
Dir: Bruno Dumont, France
5/10
Windows on the World 