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TWENTYNINE PALMS Send This Review to a Friend
The film I greatly disliked out of those sampled the Rendez-Vous With French Cinema was writer-director Bruno Dumont's "Twentynine Palms," now in commercial release. This is all the more regrettable because I so admired Dumont's film "Humanité." It was surprising how boring watching his copulating couple could be despite their nudity and explicit sex, complete with kind of orgasmic shrieking that could outdo even the soundtrack of porn flicks.
Why? Because the man and woman followed, David Wissak as David, a photographer, and Katia Golubeva as Katia, his troubled girlfriend full of mood swings, are so vacuous that watching them meander through a California desert area (the title refers to their destination) is tedious, whether they are chatting with nothing to say worth listening to or having sex repeatedly. Wissak is scruffy to look at and Golubeva, while somewhat pretty, plays a character who is such a pain that even watching her have an orgasm is dull, let alone watching her urinate, as the director has her do, whether real (as it seems) or simulated.
All of this isn't the point of the film. As David and Katia alternately fight and make love a foreboding begins to build. One senses that in the vast well-photographed space through which they drive in their huge vehicle or in the motel they use as their base, the danger of violence lurks. Frankly, it can't come too soon to relieve doldrums, but when it does it is so brutal as to also be hard to watch.
Dumont appears to be commenting on the random violence we all may face, with a particular jab at the United States, since that's the locale. He is also exploring the psychology of a victim turning on someone other than the guilty to act out pain and anger. The trouble is the film isn't compelling enough to earn the dramatic climax. "Twentynine Palms" is more annoying than profound. A Wellspring release.
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