Truly one of the worst films, I have ever had the intense displeasure of watching. Bruno Dumont and his hyper-minimalist style is an affront to anyone who takes film seriously. What he does is to remove everything that makes cinema work: acting, dialogue, music, editing, visual language. He reduces, what I think could be an engaging story, to a pseudo-documentarist look at characters that I ultimately don't give a sh** about! You see, that's what happens when you refuse to use any of the tools of the trade to form a connection with your audience; you don't get one. In the rape scene, where Demester and his friends come upon an Arab girl and gang-rape her, I didn't feel anything. When Demester leaves his friend to die, i didn't feel anything. And when Demester returns home and tells his (for lack of a better word) girlfriend that he loves her, I didn't feel anything. That's what I took away from the film: Nothing, except of course the overwhelming feeling of having wasted an hour and a half of my life that I will never get back. I won't deny, that Dumont has an eye for images. His montage-technique is quite good (although his belief that it can carry an entire movie is preposterous to say the very least). Especially the first ten minutes of the film demonstrate this. However because it never moves beyond that, I can never quite bring myself to care about what happens to the characters. If you like minimalism (which I'm not opposed to by principle), I suggest to check out film by Carlos Reygadas or some of the Italian masters. At least save yourself having to sit through 90 minutes of some pseudo-intellectuals director's formalistic experiments. Shun it! Shun it as you would a rabid dog.
Review of Flanders
