La Vie De Jesus - Bruno Dumont

Year : 1997

Country : France


The first thing you notice about the film is the scenery.It's beautiful.Long,slow takes of lush green rolling fields and meadows and a beaten dirt track running through them.The setting is a small nondescript French town on the Belgian border.

Freddie is a young man who hangs out with his bunch of friends who are all unemployed and have nothing to do except ride around on their bikes.The film is stark and there isn't much dialogue.And that's probably because the people don't really have much to talk about. They all seem trapped in their lives. In a way this is a film about the sheer painful ennui of existence in a small town.
The camera often focuses on Freddy and he always has a distant look on his face looking away into the distance and you wonder what he's thinking?He's epileptic and unemployed and maybe wants to get away from his mundane existence but probably isn't smart enough to express it in words.

And then the other thing you notice about the film is the impending sense of doom. You know this isn't a feel good film and as the tension starts to build you know it's going to explode in violence.It makes you squirm.And yet when the end does come it isn't as bad as it could have been. The director spares you the horror of a brutal murder.It would simply have been too much take.

The film crawls along at slow pace as we absorb the lives of Freddy and his gang and suddenly the monotony gets brutally shaken up by a couple of explicit sex scenes which,after the lulling pace of the narrative suddenly jar you back into attention.

This is a beautiful film that will leave you disturbed.Bruno Dumont has captured his characters with a lot of depth even though, surprisingly ,none of the actors is a professional.