The Life of Jesus (1997)

Excellent, slow-paced, but rewarding film about a dead-end 20-year old and his extremely boring life in a small French town. Freddy is a young layabout who hangs around with his friends, rides his motorbike, and has rough sex with his girlfriend Marie.This is probably the most interesting film I've ever seen about boredom. It has much in common with some of the films of Bresson, presenting an environment of extreme emptiness, all the while finding its own rhythm and feel.Action-wise, this is up there with "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" (in other words, VERY little happens) and the director takes a few stabs at showing things in a non-judgmental/anthropological light (a la Shohei Immamura) with hardcore, clinical sex scenes and the gang's sometimes amoral attitudes, but in the end that isn't the direction the film heads in (thankfully).This is an original and unusual vision in service of a story told with great strength and care. Dumont clearly knows what he is doing and he isn't copying anybody else.The film shows the youngster's world as something of a void, but one not totally devoid of beauty. There are several transcendentally gorgeous moments of pure poetry in this film that really need to be experienced. Just look at the scene where young Kadder is hugged by Marie and he looks up at the sky. What a beautiful moment!! Definitely worth seeing, highly recommended. Although if you're an ADD-afflicted sort who can only stomach films that move like bullet trains, go look at something else.

The north of France close to the Belgian border is a region contrasting with Belgium Flanders because the towns all seem to be inhabitated. You explore in the film by the camera of Bruno Dumont the non-experience of living in such a town where a love-affair with the only girl of the vicinity can develop into manslaughter when she is with somebody else. The drama of the movie is that youngsters in that region have no possibility to enjoy life because everything, the houses, the family, the people is so dull and there is no work. So they become red-necks on their motorcycle and terrorize by noise the people. The silence in this movie becomes significant because it means that the boys are confronted with their emptiness and their tedium. This gives them dangerous thoughts. This movie must end with something terrible and indeed everything is pointing in the direction of hate and jealousy.

There is enormous promise in the opening scenes of Bruno Dumont's first feature "La Vie de Jesus". He is clearly a director with a great feeling for landscape, that ability to draw the viewer into a self-contained world, in this case an agricultural area of Northern France. Within minutes we know what it is like to live in this small redbrick town bounded by seemingly endless lanes and fields where very little happens and even the local cafe is all but deserted on a weekday mid-afternoon. We share the stifling boredom of the group of unemployed youths with little do except joyride their mopeds. We are in a world akin to that of Bresson's "Au Hazard Balthazar" and "Mouchettte" with Dumont revealing his with the assured unflinching vision of the master himself. Already we are beginning to sense the thrill that comes with the intuition that we may be discovering a major new talent. A brilliantly observed scene where the group of friends visit the brother of one of them who is in a coma dying of AIDS seems to confirm this. Words cannot convey their feeling but expressions say everything. However after this doubts gradually creep in. It requires real genius to sustain viewer interest in a film about provincial ennui. Not that nothing happens. There is an attack on an Arab youth that results in manslaughter, an arrest and an escape. The problem is not a lack of psychological development. There is an inevitability about the main protagonist, Freddy's obsession with the only girl around and his gunning for the Arab as a result of sexual rivalry fuelled by group racism. Rather is the problem one of a lack of narrative development. One sequence of moped riding becomes just like any other as do all those scenes of young people just moping around. Unfortunately the film eventually evokes viewer tedium in a way that is self defeating. Nevertheless there is excitement in the discovery of a new directorial talent and the prediction that he could in time make a really outstanding film.

Around 1960 Truffaut Chabrol and theur friends stunned the world by simply filming the World around them without any message or morality . But they mostly filmed High and Middle French Bourgeoisis . This one is set far from the Cote d'Azur..But it is not a Ken Loach Movie..In British Working Class Films People Cry,Fight,Shout and Laugh...Here They Speak a Little but they dont say anything just because they have nothing to say..And when They Talk You hardly understand one word out of three..(atleast foreign audiences will enjoy the subtitles !)..This Movie is Rude and Harsh and send back to Noddyland all other so-called "no Future" Movies . Still there's a strange beauty if the filming of those northern areas close to Ruysdael and Dutch paintings.."La vie de Jesus" belongs to this kind of film you hate at first and that you keep looking and looking to understand why . An absolute Must for all Indies lovers .