Twentynine Palms

BY JOHN ANDERSON | STAFF WRITER

April 9, 2004

(U). The revenge of the French: It's going to make people crazy and angry, but Bruno Dumont's story of two lovers' trip to the desert is about us and him, not them. A film about forms and parts not fitting. Obscurist and indulgent and troubling. With Katia Golubeva, David Wissak. 1:53 (rampant, graphic sex, nudity, vulgarity, violence). In both English and French with English subtitles. At the Cinema Village, 12th Street near University Place, Manhattan.

A film, even one as purposefully infuriating as Bruno Dumont's "Twentynine Palms," cannot entirely be dismissed, because the director so adamantly knows what he's doing. It's like looking at an Edward Weston photograph of a green pepper, the planes of the fruit voluptuous and alien, and saying, "That is not a pepper." Well, it is and it isn't.

What "Twentynine Palms" is is a Weston pepper and Western anti-pop. Two people - Katia and David, played by actress Katia Golubeva and the definitive nonactor David Wissak - travel from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert to find locales for a photo shoot. What they do mostly - in their hotel pool, or against the Henry Moore-ish boulders that burst out of the windburned landscape - is have sex, often brutishly on David's part, always slavishly on Katia's. Their bodies, foreign objects though they are, become one with the landscape when they are at rest. When they resume the conventions of civilization - driving their ridiculous red Humvee, for instance, while reveling in the beauty of unspoiled nature - they become the pollutants in an otherwise pristine environment.

Dumont, although meandering indulgently into Antonioni- land with his languorous sky shots and existential time frames, isn't just exploring alienation but the forcing of square pegs in round holes (no sexual puns intended). The human being doesn't belong, in short. In even smaller terms, David has a thuggish face, Katia an angel's; one performer can act, the other can't. Their attraction is libidinous and unlikely but not uncommon to a rational/rationalizing species. But in his manipulation of the story for his own philosophic ends, Dumont does the same as his "characters." For him, America is surreal and has in its wide open spaces a sense of impending horror. Whether it's there or not, he finds it.

Had "Twentynine Palms" been rated by the Motion Picture Association of America, it would have been an NC-17. The pornography, however, lies not in the sex but - and Dumont means this - in the horror of the isolated soul. If the effect of "Twentynine Palms" is to evoke a little of this horror in each viewer - be it through the director's gruesome plot twists or a feeling of total dislocation - then Dumont has done what he set out to do.