Somewhere here someone mentions that you should see this film knowing hardly anything in advance. I agree. Better no idea, but how can you know you should see this film to begin with? Not a film for a lot of people. So I shall constrain my review so not to spoil it. I do not see any allegory as some apparently have. It tells a simple story. A man and a women stay in a motel in 29 Palms, California, and take drives out in the desert. They are lovers. They speak in both English and French. They make out and have their spats. Much of the film is slow moving. We get a heavy dose of drab reality as life is for so many of us, and what eventually later happens is another heavy dose of reality of something which does happen to a few of us. A film of nothing really beautiful. Drab, petty, slow, and then something happens. In a sense there is a certain meaninglessness throughout the film, but isn't life like that? Not a film for those depressed seeking something with which to feel good. Now there is matter-of-fact graphic nudity, which is the nudity most of us are familiar with more from life than from film. One thing it did for me is that I have resolved to have certain something with me when I go driving out in lonely stretches of desert. Definitely an art-house film, not for most of us, and not for sheer entertainment. More a film for those in a life of escapism who can use a heavy dose of reality.
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richard_sleboe15 May 2007David's Hummer H2, the color of Pinot Noir, is large enough for two people to share a confined space and be worlds apart at the same time. He is in the California desert with his girlfriend Katia, scouting locations for we don't know what. They seem to have a lot of free time, so they have lots of sex, fight a lot, drive around, stay in motels, watch TV. When the action, what little there is, feels clumsy and pointless, it's not due to poor screen writing or acting or directing, but it's because life itself is pointless and clumsy. Mostly anyway. "29 Palms" is an honest and well-made movie, a fair rendition of a couple's roadside life. Stay away if you don't like foreign-language films: they speak mostly French, both in thick, ludicrous accents, his American, hers Russian. Vincent Gallo would love it. As I still ponder how David's deep red "Hartford Folk Festival" long-sleeve is a nice change from the fake Ramones T-Shirts everybody else is wearing these days, terror strikes. Not for the faint of heart. I mean it.
NB This is a review of the 2003 French movie by Bruno Dumont, not of the 2002 US movie by Leonardo Ricagni. -
**Major Spoilers**
Twenty Nine Palms was a hard one to watch. First it bored us to death with long, untrimmed scenes, seemingly about not too much.
But I didn't think a film that had indulged itself as much as this one would fail to provide a decent payoff at the end.
Well, the film paid off all right.
A lot of what seems to be aimless ballast in the film turns out to have informed the shocking ending.
This guy who looks and acts like Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver, has a lust for sex even Travis, despite his pent up violence, does not display.
Not that the girl wasn't mostly game, though she complained about the underwater sex act in the motel swimming pool. She said her boyfriend "hurt" her.
A group of marines jump into the pool. 'Travis' then asks Katie if he would still be acceptable if he shaved his head like the raucous marines. She said he would NOT be acceptable, but the marines were "very handsome." This is a very ambivalent response to a pretty jealous boyfriend. The hair theme is pronounced in the film. It is a manlihood issue for 'Travis.' At one point Katie asks Jim what he uses on his hair. He doesn't answer.
The Marine discussion is one in a long series of actions, sex play and significant dialog between the couple that inform the violent end of the film.
'Travis' is ambivalent and a little jealous of those marines that broke up the tryst in the pool. Both the raucous marines and the jealousy theme echo in the rape scene near the end and the devastating Tsunami-like backlash later in the motel room.
There's a theme of isolation in the desert and in the two lovers' almost total separation from everyone as they wander from motel to desert and back again. The most extreme example of it is when the french-speaking Katy leaves the motel after an argument with 'Travis,' but then is so terrified at just the approach of a car on the street, that she finds herself forced to return to her lover's 'custody.' Figure it out, though. This woman does not speak English, while he does, and would not be able to explain herself to desert denizens and Los Angelenos. She has to go back to him and probably isn't that happy about returning.
At one point, the couple watches a father confess he had sex with their daughter to his wife on Jerry Springer. All along, Jim-'Travis' has been showing signs of abject soulessness in discussions with Katie. "I feel sorry for her,"says Katie. "For Who," asks Jim? "The Mother," replies Katie. Then Katie asks Jim, "would you do anything like that? "Are you crazy," replies Jim, unconvincingly. Katie looks at Jim to try to divine whether he is lying. In the right circumstance Jim would have sex with his daughter. Jim turns and smiles. The move convinces Katie it is safe to leave Jim alone with her daughter should she ever have one.
The storyteller is showing us that these two have opted away from civilized ways. In a way, they DESERVE what happens to them for wandering outside the boundaries of civilization. The uncivilized sexual play of the two in deserted and lonely places is still another indication that these two are asking for it. Indeed, their behavior contains the seeds of their destruction.
Finally, there is a need to explain the final scene of a dead naked body in the desert while a lone policeman does a 360 around body and Hummer. There were two scenes in the hotel room, one of Travis stabbing Katie in a manner that mirrors physically what had happened to him in the desert. It should be noted that he has shaved his head in the way that Bickel did in Taxi Driver, a way that Katie has said she would not approve of on him, but WOULD APPROVE OF on the Marines in the pool. See the link between the thugs in the desert and the marines in the pool on the one hand, and the ironic sheering of Jim's own locks in the bathroom before his act of rage against Katie and the World. Jim is re-enacting exactly what happened to him in the desert, coiffed like the skinhead who raped him and the marines who made him jealous.
There's the scene of Jim poised over Katie's lifeless corpse on the bed, then one of the corpse alone on the bed.
So what is Jim doing out in the desert in the last scene? I think it is possible he went out looking for the guys in the white truck and found them. They then stripped him naked again and this time finished the job. A bigger likelihood is that Jim abandoned Katie's body in the motel, drove out to the exact place where he had been raped, and, partly in remorse and despair, partly out of hopelessness, cut his own throat with the same dull knife he first cut his hair with, and then offed Katie.
This might be somewhat hard for some to admit. I'll bet I wasn't the only male who laughed at the irony when the skinhead pulled Jim's pants below his bare rear end and had a go at him.
As Roxie Hart & Chorus explained in a stagey musical number in the movie Chicago: "He Had It Comin'!" -
prosthetk16 July 2004i can easily understand why this film has been so hated, but i must say that it is at times one of the most beautiful, and at others, one of the most disturbing films i've ever seen. after seeing humanite, i walked in to the theatre with very low expectations (i'm not a dumont fan in the least), but something in the stark beauty of the photography sucked me in, i found the numb vacant space of the characters, and hook, line and sinker, fell right into dumont's trap. i doubt i would recommend this film to anyone but my closest (and most tolerant) friends, but have to say that i loved it, and thing it may also be found rewarding by other patient and adventurous viewers.
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cultfilmdistribution17 September 2006This is the first time I've ever posted a comment on IMDb. I felt so angry after watching this film that I couldn't help myself.
I should qualify my comments by first saying that I watch a lot of films - cult films, horror films, art house, American, Japanese, I watch lots of everything and I also programme films for film festivals. So this isn't a "I don't understand art cinema and only like Hollywood" kind of response. In fact, I generally like art-house cinema and older films much more than mainstream cinema.
29 Palms, however, is utter drivel. Halfway through the film I was starting to wonder whether Dumont was making a satirical comment on these flaky, pretentious and pointless characters. How else to explain that he could have felt that there could be any point in watching these incredibly boring characters. The film is nigh on unwatchable because the characters are such total dullards and nothing happens. There are times when inaction can be fascinating - Monte Hellman has a pretty good stab at a film about nothing happening in Two Lane Black Top. But I finally got the sense that Dumont felt that he was communicating some kind of grand human struggle with his characters. He isn't. He's just simply filming two stupid people playing stupid characters who act like children.
When the action does kick in, after an hour and half of utter boredom, it is totally unsatisfactory. You get the sense that Dumont has no respect for horror films. The first hour and a half is perhaps supposed to elevate the horror elements into something sublime. But this isn't a subversion of horror clichés, it's an obliterative film that takes all of the satisfaction out of the horror elements. There is a vast problem at the moment in that directors don't see the potential in genre films. Horror films these days are generally dumb or incredibly pretentious deconstructions of the genre.
The problem with 29 Palms lies in the fact that without the action of the last half hour there would be no film. But because the first three quarters of the film is so unengaging the last quarter seems utterly pointless anyway. There is no build-up of tension towards the climax, no atmosphere, just bad performances. And the climax is so obtuse that it is mostly amusing. Many great films have covered the themes of 29 Palms. Dumont's film keeps its themes out of focus in an attempt to make grand statements. Ultimately it is says absolutely nothing about anything.
After watching the extras on the disc it does indeed turn out that Dumont thinks that these characters are somehow fascinating. The main actor talks about his performance as if he invented acting. Dumont speaks as if actors have no understanding of the process that they go through. The 'Making Of' Documentary plays like Spinal Tap.
This is a grossly misguided film by a pretentious and misguided director. People will read deep meanings into it but really this is dreadful film-making of the highest order. Absolute drivel, there's no doubt about it. -
MOscarbradley16 March 2020Bruno Dumont is famous for his sex scenes which are explicit if not altogether numerous. When they aren't having sex his characters usually mope and do very little. Some people mistake this for depth. "Twentynine Palms" is a road movie, filmed in America, mostly in English with a little French and no subtitles, in which a photographer and his lover drive across the desert to a place called Twentynine Palms, stopping every so often to have sex. You might say that if Antonioni could get away with it in "Zabriske Point" then why can't Dumont, the difference being, of course, that Antonioni was an artist with something to say about the state of America at the time while Dumont's concerns are much more insular, interested in nothing but his two characters and even then, not much interested in them.
It might have helped if the characters themselves were interesting but they are simply self-centered and dull while the landscapes, (endless roads, rocks, cacti and motels), are equally boring. It's really just another case of the old ennui and the sexual act doesn't get more interesting just because it's being performed on the top of some rocks, (though I suppose it does give an extra layer of meaning to the expression 'Getting your rocks off'). Also for some reason Mr Dumont chooses to end things very badly indeed for his dull couple, perking the film up a tad in the closing minutes. -
Quag713 January 2007Well this one definitely isn't for everyone, as you can tell by the comments. For awhile, I liked this movie. I kind of liked these two driving around in the desert. The movie had that sort of dreamlike Zabriskie Point thing going on. In fact, along those lines, I'd mention that the film did feel like something from the 1960s (in a good way).
Katia Golubeva is a pretty enough girl, and we see a lot of her.
I know from regular trips to Death Valley that Europeans have a special respect for American deserts. At Badwater Junction in Death Valley, you can walk out onto the salty flats and despite the fact that you're in a giant valley, they know enough to whisper, or remain silent altogether. It's a pensive respect for the desert I wish more Americans had.
Here, you get a lot of California desert; always a good thing (to me). I liked these two characters when they were getting along - there was a weird and charming sort of innocence in their sex life and affection for each other.
Didn't fully get why they were constantly sniping at one another or why they kept having falling outs with each other. And that seems to be important to the overall point of the film, and I'm still thinking about it. I wanted to slap them - especially David - when he was being a jerk.
Because you should *never* take a sexually liberated French girl naked in the desert for granted that way (Am I right?).
The end is jarring, and a metaphor for something but I'm not sure what, exactly. Something, I suspect, about the fact that the two characters should have been a little more tender and appreciated each other more (especially on the dude's part), what with all the meanness and cruelty in the world (and so on).
This is not for everyone. It is slow moving, beautiful to look at, with characters who occasionally charm and occasionally irritate. The end sequence is disturbing and unpleasant.
If you're a fan of mainstream Hollywood, you might find this excruciatingly boring. The pervasive quiet of the movie makes the end all the more startling.
This film was not an unqualified success, but there's a fair amount to like here, I think. For certain people, anyway. -
I've seen many slow movies in my days. Some of them are among my favorites (Stalker, I You He She, etc.). However, this movie is so boring it has to be seen to be believed. Actually, ignore that--don't waste your time. This movie was so ridiculously boring that I fast forwarded through the sex scenes. Terrible, terrible stuff.
There is zero plot, nothing interesting happens, the acting is, well, uninteresting (how can one comment on the acting it takes for characters to sit in a car or have sex). It truly has nothing to recommend it except for some nice scenery--and any movie that's not a nature documentary that has me commenting on the scenery (especially a movie where the main couple is naked for 40% of the film (no, that's not the scenery I meant)) doesn't have anything going for it.
Do yourself a favor and avoid this one. -
This seems to be a serious film, although it's easy to misunderstand it or to be appalled by it. Scenes of "animalistic" sex with almost no conversation or foreplay, scenes of horrific violence, hardly any plot -- all that might be a total turn-off for many.
I was lucky to attend a Q&A session with the director, where he answered a lot of questions. The idea for this film was born when Dumont was in California desert, and, as he puts it, "I was afraid". It seems the time and space and the silence and the power of it all influenced him very much. Among other things, he addressed the audience before the film started, with "if you become afraid when you watch this film, just cover your face with hands".
He also stated later that the film is an experiemnt at expressing his feelings, and has no intent, or narrative, or message. The director is free to express himself, and the spectator is free to see whatever (s)he may in the film and take that away. The characters are stripped of anything that would make them likeable or dislikeable, and generally of anything but the very primitive in order to make the experience pure.
The characters are not the focus of the film; sound and background are. "Untreated" location sound was used throughout the film and is very important for the director to convey the sense of the place and time. In one scene one could even hear the sound of lighting generator behind the camera, which Dumont refused to edit out during the argument with the sound crew. Camerawork is also original and important in this experience.
The serenity of transcendent scenes remind me of Zabriskie Point. Using explicit sex and violence remind me of Irreversible and I Stand Alone. Yet, this is certainly not a "following", this is a highly personal expression, which is designed to generate a highly personal experience for any viewer.
Altogether NOT recommended if one is looking for "normal" filmgoing experience. -
idf4519 January 2007I saw this film on the Sundance channel while on vacation. I was tired and sleepy at 3 AM, yet with all its frustrating flaws, I was not quitting on this unusual fare and was so glad to have seen it through to its horrific conclusion. There are definitely many respectable strokes of directorial brilliance in this film. There's no question that the everage, still-puritan American is not ready for the intensly normal love-making depicted in this film. To dismiss it as pornographic is immature and ignorant. Precisely because this film ventures into new stylistic territory that it holds your interest. The story line is not great, it is often uneven, awkward, poorly paced and cut, but as soon as you hit a low you get soon gratified by any one of the many high notes of this film. This film should be seen for its originality, for its difference from the standard fare. It's anything but forgettable.
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DocFilm14 January 2007POSSIBLE SPOILER (If further spoilage is possible) It should take longer for directors to go into decline. A great disappointment after Pola X. He got much more out of Golubova in that film --- maybe her characterization, such as it is, and ultimate fate, in 29 Palms reflects a deterioration in their relationship.
Contrary to many comments, the dissatisfaction is not about the slow pace we still love L'Avventura, Bergman, etc., but when there is nothing to look at in the frame, things become very boring. Narcissists are boring, and neither the director nor the actors (nor the Hummer) show us any complications of interest. It may be news to this French director that the California desert is harsh, the roadside strip malls soulless, but it shouldn't be news that sex can be soulless. No, I don't expect the director to make it erotic, but he shows nothing new about sex or violence to those of us over 10 years old.
Some have called this a horror film. Is it the horror of kitsch, of Disneyland, of TV,celebrity culture, of corporate America, of present day politics? Seen it all before. The horror of nothingness?: Been done much better before. This film telegraphs the upcoming horror leadenly --- 15 minutes into it I thought "Deliverance." -
monk_venkman30 July 2006Given the talk on this film, I really wasn't expecting much. And after watching it, I can safely say, that I will never trust the opinions of others again. Unlike my opinion, which you should all listen to! The complaints from people who say it's too slow moving, have obviously never treated themselves to some of the better films from Leigh or Jarmusch. I can imagine what they'd think of Stranger than paradise. These types of movie goers should be ignored at all costs. These ADD movie watchers are the reason films like Breakdown have to turn into a Rambo movie somewhere in the middle. Because studios are afraid these cinematic sugar addicts will never follow a film not layered in one liners, cool dialogue, and fast action.
Directed by Bruno Dumont, Palms moves along not so much in a slow and uneventful manner, as rather in a real life, non Hollywood fashion we all move in. Especially when we find ourselves in a small and hot desert town, as this couple does.
David (David Wissak) and Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva) are out in the California desert to find a setting for a photo shoot for David, an independent photographer. It's great that there are no distractions from the two main characters. No lights or heavy traffic, or friends stopping by for coffee. These two are as passionate as they are unstable in their relationship. They regularly shift back and forth between controlled arguing and uncontrolled sexual release. All of which is magnified by the heat and isolation of their surroundings.
What I love about this film is that I can't remember a single line from it. Just as I can't remember most conversations overheard in everyday life. They talk about the same mundane things we all do, while having the same petty arguments most in relationships have as well.
I know that hardly sounds like great movie viewing, but don't worry, that's not the entire film. Nor is it what makes this film brilliant. What makes it brilliant is how it uses the seemingly uneventful as it's base, while building upwards from that with a constant undertone of tension and dysfunction that shifts back and forth between blunt and subtle.
This is not a fun movie to watch. But it is one that I will never forget. -
alexx66815 January 2006"Twentynine Palms'" elliptical storyline features a young couple leaving Los Angeles and moving to the Southern Californian desert. That's pretty much it, it's as sparse as they come. Thereafter we only watch fragments from the couple's everyday life, which mostly includes driving around the desert and having sex. They don't talk much, and when they do it's in a half-incomprehensible and meaningless manner.
This part of the film is an exercise in existential abstraction, a distant relative of Antionioni's "the Passenger", or even Gus Van Sant's "Gerry". The most notable thing about it is the unnerving & disquieting atmosphere seeping out of the landscape, and the shadow-play of the storyline. But generally it's so-so.
Near the end, the couple gets attacked by a group of thugs (a sequence reminiscent of Gaspar Noe's shock cinema), the man is beaten up and raped while the woman watches. In the end the man murders the woman.
This completes the film's allegorical meaning: the couple as a loose metaphor for the United States, and the attack symbolising the 11/9 attacks. This allegorical level enhances the film's significance. It's not a masterpiece, but it's a worthwhile watch that makes for a refreshing change from all the Harry Potters and Lords of the Rings out there. -
jkantor4 June 2009It's not even enough to blame this on warped French sensibilities. There is no movie here - no plot, no story, no theme, no characters, no cinematography, no soundtrack - just boring shots of the desert inter cut with boring shots of awkward sex - until you finally and mercifully get an ending that is apparently from a different movie entirely. I think it must be a perverse joke by the director - some kind of statement on the absolute banality of our lives if we are willing to sit through something like this - and the fact that the best we can hope for is a violent end to our empty existence. The director should never be allowed to touch a camera again in his life.
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howard.schumann13 October 2003A three-legged dog, a dead body lying naked in the middle of the desert, a cop on his walkie-talkie calling for backup and a road block miles from the nearest inhabitant. These and other bizarre things show up in Twentynine Palms, the latest film by Bruno Dumont (La Vie de Jesus, L'Humanite). It is essentially a horror film that might easily be called "Scream 4". The opening scenes are beautiful and serene. David (David Wassik), an independent photographer from Los Angeles, and Katia (Katia Golubeva), a young woman without work, travel in a red 4X4 Hummer toward the vast California desert preparing to do a photo shoot for a magazine near the Joshua Tree National Park. The road leads to a motel in the city of 29 Palms, a desert oasis that in the film consists of one gas station, one hotel, and a swimming pool. Dumont says that he filmed in the U.S. rather than his native France because he " felt the need to change space, ingredients, colors... and it is while filming in California that I had a true shock". The shock extends to the viewer as well.
There is little dialogue or action in the conventional sense. The communication between the couple is complicated by the absence of a common language: he speaks English, she only speaks French. What conversation exists is trapped in a level of superficial banality. The lovers explore the desert in their 4X4 and are focused entirely upon their own pleasure, seemingly defined by their sexuality. They swim in the motel pool, watch game shows on television, eat, make love in the middle of the desert, eat some more, argue and make up, then make love some more, all shown in explicit detail. Everything is familiar, a slice of typical Americana, yet nothing is as it seems.
Little by little the milieu becomes oppressive; a quiet and incoherent fear begins to settle in, an abstract fear because as Dumont says, "there is no reason to be afraid." At the end, nothing can fill the emptiness but destruction. The contrast between the poetry of nature and the constricted range of the human experience is clear. In this world without a spiritual core, the screams of pain and screams of delight are indistinguishable and anguish has the same meaning as pleasure. According to Dumont, "There is at the same time the bliss of pure happiness and absolute horror, the capacity to generate the two extremes: the hyper violence and the hyper pleasure. This is a couple that lives for pure pleasure and that will be led into abomination."
One cannot be neutral about a Bruno Dumont film (many people walked out during the Vancouver showing). His audiences are polarized between those who love and those that detest his films and the director seems disinterested in reconciling the two. I found this film extremely difficult to watch and even harder to be emotionally engaged with the characters. Dumont tests our endurance with scenes of brutal violence, making no concession to our sensibilities. In bringing us face to face with our worst nightmare, however, he forces us out of our state of emotional detachment and compels us to react, not with our minds or even our hearts, but viscerally with the totality of our being. Far removed from the pre-digested package cinema of Hollywood, Dumont has made an important statement about American values. The question must be asked however -- with films like Twentynine Palms that are so off-putting, will there be anyone who notices? -
It is impossible to define this movie as a "horror" or "drama" or "art". It is very hard to actually describe what this movie is about. It is extremely long and mostly consist of a ton of totally irrelevant scenes, dominantly riding in the desert, quarrels and sex under somewhat outdoor conditions. Nothing happens for about one and half hour, then there is a mess of unconnected scenes that try to be violent and dramatic.
There are many interpretations in the reviews about what is happening in the movie, but the fact is that the movie has no introduction, no sequential story, no climax and no end. It is not a story, it is a group of gray blots where the patient audience may try to fill some story of their own. But these interpretations are not based on any facts, because there are no facts in the movie.
Some say the girl is "unemployed girl from LA" and the guy is "a filmmaker". But I have noticed no facts supporting this explanation. The movie starts with the long sequence where the guy drives the car and the girl sleeps. The violence is supposed to be based on fact the guy hurt the dog. Well, the dog had three legs even before the collision. And I cannot somewhat accept gay ass-rape as the revenge of the injury of dog, it is so definitely out of place. There is no way to interpret the ending and especially murder of the girl. It just does not have any sense. I mean no sense at all!
The whole movie is excruciatingly boring and some full body nudity, a bit of violence and occasional simulated sex cannot save the ordinary viewer from the death of boredom. Intellectuals will try to project some of their ideas to this emptiness and may actually enjoy their made up stories and hypotheses of deep meanings of the movie and therefore like it. But they like their own interpretations, not the actual movie as there "is no movie in this movie".
The ending of the movie is as pointless as the beginning, only it is very accelerated. It is shortened so much that you have the idea the filmmakers just ran out of the money and had to wrap the thing quickly so they have enough cash to buy the fuel to get back from the desert.
I can recommend this piece only for fanatics of "Dogma" and such weird attempts for "high art" movies. Anyone who expects just a enjoyable thriller / horror / drama will hate this movie. -
kenjha18 April 2010An arrogant jerk and his whiny girlfriend embark on a journey to scout locations for photo shoots. The journey's rather uneventful but unfolds at an excruciatingly deliberate pace. They drive, make love, fight, make love, swim, make love, pet stray dogs, make love, buy groceries, make love, eat, make love, watch TV, make love, etc. This goes on for about 95 percent of the film's 17-hour running time. Then in the last few minutes of the film, something out of the blue happens that is totally unconnected to what has happened up until then. Warning: Dumont, the French genius who made the equally atrocious "L'Humanite," apparently is still on the loose and armed with a camera.
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fraghera16 May 2011I seen this movie yesterday. In fact translated English subtitle to Turkish and it finished yesterday :) Anyway it was very fearless movie witch broke the rules of cinema, i know have been broken before by other directors but nowadays i haven't seen a new shoot movie which has this kind of sex scenes after Ken Park (2002).
The other interesting point was an unconditional fidelity and love of the girl (Yekaterina Golubeva as Katia) to the man.
Katia's acting was awesome. Especially there is a scene which is very funny, she says "i love you" while man talking a lot about how he cant understand her.
This is a kind of movie which u like or hate.
Also this is a movie that u cant watch with your family. Cos it contains really hard sex scenes, sometimes like a porn.
The directors note at the end of movie's trailer was interesting and so true. -
writers_reign31 July 2005... is riveting compared to this crud. I used to think Godard had it all wrapped up pseud-wise but this guy can give him cards and spades. In this so-called movie we follow a nebbish, a guy who has neither looks, charm or charisma and resembles nothing so much as a young Timothy Carey who has somehow lucked into a pretty, even at times beautiful girl who is accompanying him across the desert, a drive punctuated every ten minutes or so for screwing sessions - making love is definitely NOT the phrase to illustrate these couplings. They also eat, check out the scenery, quarrel, make up but it always comes back to coupling. After what seems like several decades but is only about 100 minutes they are run off the road by a gang of sub-humans, the guy is beaten with a baseball bat and raped by one of the animals as the girl, who has been stripped naked but is otherwise unmolested, is forced to watch. The gang drives off. The couple repair to a motel. The girl is stabbed to death. The next shot shows the man, naked and dead in the desert. Slow fade. If only Dumont had opened (and closed) with the last ten minutes he would have done us all a favour. Total rubbish and a waste of good film stock.
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Cinef22 December 2004I thought this film was excellent! (maybe not as good as La vie de Jesus or L'Humanite=same director) But you have to look at it differently than when you watch an entertaining Hollywood-film. This film is not entertaining at all, but that doesn't mean it's bad. The film doesn't really tell a story. It does something else: it "captures" an atmosphere, a strange kind of tension, a weird feeling, it captures the flux of life without dramatization... something which, for me at least, is much more interesting than just telling a story. There are other great directors doing it (in different ways of course): Hungarion Directot Béla Tarr, Austrian Director Michael Haneke, Gus van Sant (in his best films), or look at the films of Japanese director Ozu: his films have a lot in common with bruno dumont's in the sense that they don't rely on the script when making a film. they rely on the film when making the film!... The film is what touches me, not the story. A masterpiece!
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If you like endless and pointless scenes of two people driving without saying a word to each other; if you like two atrocious actors dominating the entire film, the male lead's dialogue consisting mostly of grunting and uttering monosyllables and the female lead sputtering incoherent nonsense in Russian-accented French; if you like sex scenes where the male notifies us that he is having an orgasm by emitting a bellow like Lex Barker playing Tarzan; if you like a film with abundant nudity that is astonishingly unerotic and in which the male lead's scrotum gets more screen time than Marlon Brando did in "Apocalypse Now;" if you like a film in which a pointlessly violent ending borrowed from "Deliverance," "Psycho," and "Zabriskie Point" gives you a feeling of relief because at least something finally happened; then this is the film for you.
The phrase "existential ennui" comes to mind, yet the ennui wasn't on the screen, which I think is what the director had in mind, it was in this viewer. It does have some redeeming points; there are some scenes showing the stark beauty of the desert (but I saw these in Disney's "The Living Desert" back in 1954; you get to see all of Katia Golubeva's very nice body (but that's just me; I'm a dirty old man); and the director is able, in the second half, to build and maintain an atmosphere of menace and impending doom. But that's about it. If I wanted to waste my time looking at something pointless, I'd watch reruns of "Seinfeld." The only other film I've seen by this director (he's only made three) is L'Humanite (another film plagued by bad acting), and I didn't think he could get much worse. But M. Dumont proved me wrong and succeeded. -
rmax3048237 July 2006It must have been a small-budget film and it shows. Sort of a travelogue with sex and violence, it meanders along the byways of Jumbo Rocks and Twentynine Palms, California.
Impressive, dignified scenery, and that's about it. Katia plays Katia, who speaks only French. David plays David, who speaks English and some French that falls just short of execrable, which is to say very much like my French. From some angles she looks a bit like Michelle Pfeiffer and from some angles he resembles Harry Dean Stanton. It's difficult to comment on their acting because, aside from some memorized exchanges, it seems that most of the time the director simply aimed the camera their way and said, "Okay, make something up." There's a good deal of playful poking and laughter, like that in John Cassavetes' films. People chuckle and giggle because they can't seem to think up anything else to do.
The couple has squabbles and sex. The reasons for the squabbles? Let's see. He looks at another woman in a cafe. He buys her ice cream and asks if she likes it. "C'est bon," she replies, then, "Pas bon." (He sulks because she contradicts herself.) He hits a dog while driving the Hummer because she's blocking his window. Another argument, a serious one, occurs when she locks herself in the bathroom for reasons unexplained.
Is there sex? Yes, there is sex, simulated, and a lot of nudity. I had a sneaking suspicion that Katia and David weren't even married, yet here they are, stripping off in the desert, revealing themselves in all their hairy, angular, bilaterally symmetrical splendor. They lie on abrasive rocks, spreadeagled shamelessly. A couple of airliners pass overhead and any passenger who wanted to could look down on them from 37,000 feet and watch them rut and squirm like two javelinas. They don't care. They fornicate on rocks, in swimming pools, and in motel rooms. Oh, and speaking of animals, when David has an orgasm he makes more noise than Katia, although, to be sure, both of them overact in these scenes like porno superstars. What repugnant physicality.
The movie drags along for quite a while and when the climax comes we are totally unprepared for it. I don't know whether to get into it or not. I don't think I will, except to say that the scene seems to have been brought in from another movie entirely, some kind of slasher flick with a title like "Blood and Cactus". The heavies seem to be either Marines or skinheads, maybe both. The final episode of violence takes place for reasons that escape me completely.
Maybe I missed something. Could it be that life is like a road? It has its asphalt pavement and its potholes? Occasional stop signs? Long waits while indifferent freight cars rumble slowly through the crossing, sometimes stopping completely? And at the end you have a fatal traffic accident? This is a French movie so maybe I used the wrong national heuristic. The point of a French film might be that there is no point. That's the whole point.
In the end I found the film kind of sad. Not just because of what happens to Katia and David, but for reasons the producers probably never intended. At the beginning the couple stare in awe at acres and acres of energy-generating windmills arrayed across the desert. They find it splendid. I didn't. The ivory sand is dotted with Joshua trees and creosote bush, and littered with flowery paper wrappers, glittering aluminum cans and empty shotgun shells. The Hummer matter-of-factly passes a pile of half a dozen huge, black, discarded tires. If you fly into LAX there are days when you can see the smog as far inland as Twentynine Palms. The point I took away from the film is that if you treat a natural landscape as a garbage dump it becomes a garbage dump sooner or later. A desert ecosystem is a fragile one and, like a human life, can only take so much abuse before it is destroyed. -
Polar_Jazzman19 September 2004Twenty-nine palms. Directed by Bruno Dumont. ****
Film-making is about images NOT stories.
I just can't believe the amount of awful reviews this great film has been receiving in the site. It is a shame that people actually don't get it, when it fact it works in two levels perfectly.
The first level is intellectual. You can dissect it in its metaphors, symbols, etc. but I don't like that because we will not ever know what was happening in Dumont's head (conscious and unconscious) when he filmed it.
The second level is plain emotional. You can take the film as an atypical horror film. And it truly scared the hell out of me. It shocked me in a way no other film did before. Ever.
The acting sucks? I don't think so. They are just acting natural. It's not like: "Look at me, uh! Look at me, Give me my freaking Oscar!". They are just portraying common people. And if you don't like how common people talk, well... beat it!
That's another issue that annoyed me. A lot of people have stated here: "Writing on it sucks" Well, What were you expecting? Retro-linguistics, artsy-historic wannabe type, on the track of major turkeys like "Troy", "King Arthur" or "The Village"? Give me now a major break and let me tell you this is how people talk. Go out more often, if you please.
The great trick on the film, is that Dumont made it so hiper realistic. So, when the shocker ending comes, it hits you like a van running at 110 mph in the middle of the Joshua Tree Desert. And yes, ready to scare you off to death.
10/10 -
fs-1927 September 2004I had a different way of viewing the situation in the film. The actors were almost like innocents in the garden of eden. There were classic signs of tragedy along the way. The Hummer (and other things)symbolized the male pride) which had such a profound effect on the outcome. This man has shut himself off, to a certain degree, from feelings that are not considered 'masculine' such as compassion for animals.At times he considers the woman 'silly' and does not heed her emotional language. He holds her head underwater a little bit too long.
I also saw it as an anti-war, anti-violence statement. The outside world kept threatening to encroach on the idyllic moments of the man and woman. When outsiders finally intervened it was catastrophic and bred additional catastrophic events. Just as war does and very relevant to the situation in Iraq. It is very difficult to separate ones private life from what is going on the the world at large.
These are just my thoughts. The film is burned in my thoughts. -
themarina16 October 2003Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Can I say it enough times? I'm not sure why I stayed through this nightmare (probably because I'd spent my $7 and wanted my money's worth - and part of me wanted to see if it got any better). This was nothing more than a advertisement for Hummer with two people traveling through the desert, screaming at each other, when not arguing with each other they're having really violent sex, and then,in the end, going crazy. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it does. The violence that erupts in the last 20 mins of this movie came out of nowhere. Nothing led up to it, there was no motive, nothing. It was pointless.
The best part of this movie was the ending. For two reasons: 1) it was finished and the punishment was over and 2) the end scene was very, very good.
I don't suggest seeing this but if you decide to see this nightmare for yourself, make sure you watch the last 2 mins. They are very, very good.