Twentynine Palms (2004)

This is one of those films where "nothing happens", where the frame stands as a window into the world of tedium. It's contrasted against this humming nothingness, mirrored in the film in the empty stretches of desert, that the small gestures can reverberate outwards to the eternal, to give us a portrait of life as we might know it by our own existence, elsewhere, in some other time.These fleeting human moments, painful or exhilarating in their small profundity, largely make the film for me. A man stealing a glance at a passing girl in a diner, glance which may or may not be casual or mean something else, and which makes the woman sulk in jealous consternation. The woman trying to penetrate the hard, unyielding, demeanor of the man, asking him as he drives what is he thinking, the man saying nothing. The irritable tantrum of the man when their car won't go any further in a dirt road, that reveals the male child inside, petulant and impotent at the sight of failure.Elsewhere Dumont fails to cut as incisively. The contrast he gives us in the first pool scene, "do you love me?", "do you like my penis?", is simpleminded at best.The film works despite all that, first as a tangible reminder of the meaninglessnes of craving, here in the form of carnal animal sex that needs to be consumated, almost exorcised, the moment it builds. The nothingness of Dumont's desert world is not the shunyata of the Buddhists though, a realization of the world in true form. Rather it's a limbo where souls in disconnect aimlessly drag their feet yearning for a sense of direction or purpose when the only sense possible is a sense of still time. This shines for me in the latenight scene where David finds Katia sitting by herself at the side of the macadam, they seem like they're washed ashore in some other plain of existence. A pall of simmering, unspeakable, violence hangs over this like the shifting rents of dust in a dirt road, so that at least a breaking point can be surmised to be waiting at the other end.Then it works for me as a painful vehicle that brings us at the brink of the existential void. I'm not very enamored of the act of random cruelty that makes this possible, the randomness makes sense yet at the same time it's so easy as to be schematic, but the monster that emerges on the other end is a shocking sight to me because I have the memory of the flawed human being that used to be.The dysfunction of the protagonists then, foremostly human, also foreshadows doom. That malaise we see but small traces of in their behavior must exist out there too, in the rest of the world that is largely kept from our eyes.Dumont doesn't dare go any further than this, that is if we accept there is somewhere to go, but as an agnostic lament it goes far enough.

Just finished this.....movie? I'm not sure what else to call it. It's 2 hours of watching 2 people, fight, drive, eat, f**k, swim, fight, f**k, drive, eat, pee, f**k, and ON and ON and ON!!!!!!! Eventually, they are raped and killed. All this happens in the mystical beauty of the American Southwestern Desert. So, was it good? I have no idea. Was it art? Sure, why not. One thing I will say is that every time I wanted to shut this film off, I didn't, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because the lead actress was smoking hot and couldn't seem to keep her clothes on for more than 15 minutes. Maybe it was because I really wanted to see the main guy if this film get hit by a bus. Why does every guy in this movie scream when they have an orgasm like somebody just dumped boiling water on their genitals? Ugh?!?! Would I watch it again? Probably not. 29 Palms will undoubtedly haunt my mind for a few days. If this is what the director was going for, then bravo. I've also received the same effect after seeing a 300 pound women in a bikini. That incident didn't take 2 hours of my life away. For what its worth, the two lead actors did a damn good job acting like a dysfunctional couple on a road trip. I've been there, only nobody raped or killed me because of it.

Yes, reading the reviews is much more rewarding. By any measure.This review contains spoilers. Read further anyway. It doesn't matter, even when you're intending to see the movie.The film begins with two people in a SUV, David and Katia, driving to the Joshua Tree Desert. Despite all their misunderstandings, they feel attracted to each other, but regularly explode in quarrels and fights. That part of the film was logical and understandable. The film is a study in how relationships can go haywire. One can have look at what they talk. Or you could listen to the silence when they should talk. In your mind, you could even speak up for them when they fail.But why did they cut away the entire character development? Really, I could not care less about David and Katia. What they said and how they behaved was in the end meaningless. In contrast, I rather enjoyed their nude bodies, their physical exercise and the wonderful landscape of the Joshua Tree Desert. Wow.The film ends with three hillbillies tailgating them on a desert road, stopping them, pulling them from the car, and raping David. Why and WHY did this happen? Out from the nothing, the film ends with a sudden conclusion, and you'll never get to know why they were targeted.It has been said that Bruno Dumont, the director of this film, translated a life-negating state of mind into a film. David and Katia were already outcasts in the beginning - he speaks only English and French, Katia only Russian and French - and they were rejected by the desert, a place where you have to rely on your fellow human beings in order to survive."Twentynine Palms" is an ill-fated parable. I don't say Bruno Dumont is a bad filmmaker. But as a filmmaker, he forgot to counterbalance the philosophical, psychological and the tardiness parts with a credible and suspenseful story.

This is a film about a young couple, possibly at an early stage in their relationship, who are out in the desert somewhere in California in a humvee. The young man David is scouting for locations to photograph but doesn't seem to get up to much work, Katia his girlfriend is a francophone. They communicate fairly well through a mixture of pidgin French and English from David, but it adds a little distance maybe. It's a harsh kind of a film that makes you feel uneasy from the start. The relationship is very volatile and the desert locations unrelenting. It ends in horror. One warning to anyone who sees the movie is that it is very sexually explicit.I hadn't realised that Dumont had an interest in image, this film is full of the most awesome experimental image work. There was this scene at the start where the Hummer is taking on petrol at the gas station and there's the tiniest frame made from where the road embankment in the background starts at the bottom to the top of the open car door frame at the top, a sliver where cars dash past, but they're also dashing into their own reflection in the side windows of the car, and all this is brutally at about head level. I wondered if this might have been accidental brilliance, so casually did the movie appear to have been made. However very shortly afterwards I was really sitting up because there's another masterpiece of composition where a train with white containers passes in front of this windfarm and you only get to see the windmills in the gaps between the slowly moving containers. It's one of the most beautiful shots I've ever seen in a movie. Again in the pool at the hotel, you can see a guy who wants to work the camera, the shot is really only a couple of inches above the lapping water and you see this image of David, strongly distorted by the water that's pretty cool.There are some very primal love scenes shot in what I refer to as the sea of stone, the pair of lovers apricating naked on a gigantic rock resting their heads on the other's boot, reminiscent of Zabriskie Point to me. The ending of the movie is so brutal, and even to me unexpected, because I hadn't read anything about the film. I feel almost like crying about it now.It's a film about the distance even between the minds of two lovers, and the incipient brutality of an alienated society. A total masterpiece.