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That is to say: Bruno Dumont, and suddenly the pale hues of the Atlantic coast emerge—the coastline where he has filmed most of his work: white sand edging the ocean, and the sky a kind of question mark, whose dot might well be an overinflated Oliver Hardy, floating like a balloon. The landscape becomes a trench, dug in defiance and at the margins of a French cinema that is so often bourgeois, and so thoroughly anchored—exhaustingly so—in the capital. In his films, one encounters everything from a Jesus on a moped to a headbanging Joan of Arc, a nun expelled from her convent, or a genuine resurrection miracle. From the outset, he has presented himself as a secular mystic, heir in his own way to Bresson, Dreyer, and everything Schrader called transcendental cinema—diametrically opposed to American cinema’s eternal pursuit of redemption. Dumont seeks grace, but only the kind that reveals itself in ordinary people. It took him years to allow himself to work with professional actors: the first was an unadorned Juliette Binoche, and by then he’d already been making films for fifteen years. Later, perhaps tired of being told he took himself too seriously, he plunged into grotesque comedy—unapologetically embracing madcap humor, paying homage to silent film, parodying television with the help of the divine Léa Seydoux and the incorrigible Blanche Gardin, even directing an utterly unclassifiable series along the way. Yet always with his distinct aerial style—never leaden, always allergic to the faintest whiff of academicism. Applauded at Cannes since The Life of Jesus (1997), which earned him the Caméra d’Or, Bruno Dumont has built his own universe beneath the Atlantic’s blue sky, at France’s farthest edge. All that was missing were imperial cruisers shaped like cathedrals. God, as it turns out, has chosen to reveal Himself in the most unexpected way.
-Philipp Engel
