Humanité

Description

Bruno Dumont's (The Life of Jesus) controversial and award-winning film follows a police detective trying to solve a brutal rape and murder of an 11 year-old girl.

Customer Reviews:

A masterpiece, for those who can handle it...........2006-09-04

This is a masterpiece, and this is what art cinema should be. It's challenging, memorable, haunting, and visceral. It's Dumont's best film, and it's a film that harks back to the days of great art cinema. It's very reminiscent of Antonioni's L'avventura, but it isn't a blatant copying of that film. Many film critics (though not all of them) have not liked this film. Dumont usually gets thrown out with the bath water with current day critics, who seem less inclined to like and appreciate challenging films such as this. The derision this film (and others he's made) suffers is along the lines of Catherine Breillat and Manoel de Oliveira. Their films (especially Breillat's) usually get trashed by critics, saying they're pretentious and overly artsy, where if they were released in the 1970's, they would be appreciated and praised for being the masterpieces that they are. Breillat is attacked personally. De Oliveira does get praise mainly because he's 99 years old and still making films, not for the actual films. The actual reviews are usually sarcastic and smug about his actual work. I'm not sure why critics dislike Humanite' and films of its nature, other than it could be generational, and the current crop of people are so detached and cynical that they can't feel a damn thing. Regardless, this is a great film, one that needs to be viewed over and over again.

Hopperesque.......2005-02-04

The previous reviewer was very insightful. I would add that the imagery aesthetic seems like an Edward Hopper painting - with isolated, silent characters in sparse environment. The scale of the movie is the opposite of epic. It is on a human scale - to the extent of being on the scale of a single individual. A nice touch was to make the lead character's breathing the undertone of much of his scenes. His stiff child-like walk, slow pronunciation and wide-eyed countenance lends him an aura of sincerity through innocence which meshes well with the silent portayals of his inner thought process. The final scene is rich in possible interpretations - ask yourself why she reacts that way.

Simply awful.......2004-11-26

As I recall this movie was quite well received by several serious US reviewers, who can usually be trusted when a movie is of Hollywood origin, but whose opinions are to be treated with great skepticism when it is European or foreign. For some reason they judge such films by a different standard and often hold really dreadful ones up with obsequious awe as masterpieces (usually the ones where nobody knows what the Hell is going on!).

That happened with L'Humanité. My opinion is that it's a piece of pretentious crap with almost no redeeming features. Insufferably long, pointless and boring, it attempts self-resuscitation though several scenes of graphic sex and tries to shock its soporific audience to wakefulness with pointless, clinical display of female genitalia. For the rest, we must sit for hours watching the slow progress of the phlegmatic (literally) Pharon across the dull landscape of Normandy. From the lengthy studies of his dolorous expression, we are perhaps expected to abstract some deep inner meaning - possibly each one of us according to our level of understanding (that old saw!). But I get the impression that nobody on this production team, from Bruno Dumont on down, has much idea of what it means either. This brings to mind a witty interview with Ephriam Kishon on the Modern Artist, where he could have been discussing this sort of film. See http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/kishon.html

I feel like going to the bathroom.......2004-06-16

Humanite is a film NOT to be missed for sure. Despite being by far the worst movie I have ever seen (and I've seen a lot of losers), Humanite grasps the essence of a typical French culture, and holds on masterfully. The protagonist, Pharon de Winter, and his detective boss accurately portray police as they really are --- slow, apathetic, and ugly? The chilling touch of Pharon's mucus which hangs from his lower lip as he goes on a long bike ride throughout the country shows how the French are able to protray the grittiness of the world, a notable quality. Speaking of grittiness, the gratuitous shots of a severed part of the female anatomy (you know which) heightened the integrity of the French film makers and caused me to lean over the side of my couch to respectively vomit into a pail. Only a film like Humanite could make someone do that . . . that's for absolute sure. And only a film like Humanite could show the trouble one has when choking on an apple. I felt Pharon's pain as he emitted a hideous noise from his esophogus in his attempt to eject a chewed up piece of an apple. I felt it approximately five times. And since I'm speaking of pain, the director's display of Pharon as a lonely, weak, homosexual, and pathetic loser were captured in his attempt to play piano . . . and hum to it at the same time. Yep, there sure isn't a movie like Humanite that has all of that in it. And I guarantee that there's no movie ever made that showed a furious man (Pharon in front of the mayor's building towards the end of the film) appearing as though he just developed a thyroid condition. Yes, sir . . . Humanite has it all. Love, sex, murder, anger, disgusting shots of female anatomy, pointless conversations, bike rides, detectives, trains, cars, scenes of a person choking on an apple, scenes of a person trying his hand at piano, and of course, Pharon de Winter. After watching this movie for the first time, a rather horrible taste of bolus and something else really bad enveloped my mouth and caused me to gag. I then immediately rushed here to write this up. If you haven't seen Humanite yet, you need to . . . it will change you, that's a guarantee.

The Horror (~ real police work in action).......2004-05-22

Not for those who like action films, not for children and not a good first date film, Humanite is nonetheless a subtle masterpiece that molds the putty of murder mystery into a psychological thriller of infinite pathos. This Cannes winner begins with a disturbing shot of a violated 11 year old who is murdered. Then it founders in the minimalist, even nonplot aftermathh of this horror. A subplot of an erotic crush, repressed homosexuality, and a work strike follow as we follow this colorful noir about a touched superintendent (lead detective) who is the great grandson of a religious painter who paints, among other things, beautiful little girls, It then seems to go nowhere as the detective, who lives with his mother after losing his own child and woman, founders about in the sort of police activity that is more like the bureaucratic incompetence of most police cases than the plot twists of a murder mystery and thriller. In the end however we realize that this is far more than a successful whodunit. The lack of action is motivated by a world-weary denial that has religious overtones of the fall and indicts us all for complicity in what might be called reality's constitutive crime against innocence, symbolized by the opening rape murder and the gap between trying to comprehend it and the necessary but ultimately insupportable thought that the forces that led to it are absolutely alien to those observing. Not for the squeamish, and yet more so perhaps than life. The solution to the crime and the ability to look at ourselves are here inseparable-suggesting a symbolic meaning beyond the opening horror of this haunting and strangely realistic French film.

Gregoire Moulin Versus Mankind! / Gregoire Moulin Contre l'Humanite (Original French Version with English Subtitles)

Average customer rating:

One of the best French comedies in years!

Gregoire Moulin Versus Mankind! / Gregoire Moulin Contre l'Humanite (Original French Version with English Subtitles)
Starring: Artus de Penguern , Pascale Arbillot , Élisabeth Vitali , Antoine Duléry , and Didier Bénureau
Director: Artus de Penguern
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Product Description

Ne au vendredi 13, orphelin quelques heures apres sa naissance, eleve par une grand-mere hargneuse et un oncle alcoolique, Gregroire Moulin a pris un mauvais depart dans la vie. A 35 ans, il est celibataire et un modeste employe dans une compagnie d'assurances. Mais comme l'existence est pleine de surprises, c'est par un dimanche de mai que le destin de Gregroire Moulin prend un virage inattendu et mene a Paris ou il decouvre l'amour. Usant d'un subterfuge inavouable, Gregroire reussit a obtenir un rendez-vous dans un cafe avec la delicieuse professeure de danse, Odile Boheur. Helas, la maladresse et l'anxiete chronique de Gregroire et le peu d'amabilite des Parisiens vont transformer ce simple redez-vous en une course contre la montre... et l'human

Customer Reviews:

One of the best French comedies in years!.......2005-06-22

Ignore the credits on this page - this definitely does NOT star Seann William Scott, although he is lined up for the proposed American remake. But it's hard to see how it could match this little-seen treasure. Starring, directed and co-written by Artus de Penguern, 'Gregoire Moulin' definitely deserves to be better known.

The plot is pretty much lifted from 'After Hours': a shy and spectacularly unlucky office worker finds himself locked out and goes through a night of hell trying to get the office keys so he can make a date with the ballet teacher he has admired from afar. Minor inconveniences lead to increasingly major disasters until he finds himself pursued across night time Paris by a psychotic taxi driver and his dog, a pair of swingers, a suicidal woman, Adolf Hitler, various cops, football hooligans, and other maniacs in a city in the life-or-death grip of the football cup final (in which many supporting characters appear as players in one subtle touch). As the game intensifies, Moulin's misadventures begin to mirror the play on the field to increasingly bizarre effect, while his beloved's reaction to the copy of 'Madame Bovary' she is trying to read in a bar packed with football fans has its own effect on the game.

Its humour is a mixture of Clouseau, Tati, Chaplin and others, albeit with a darker French spin, and it has moments of real comic genius and some outrageous sight gags that will have you reaching for the rewind button. Sadly, it goes awry in the last reel (and it's a bit disconcerting for non-French audiences to see a comedy end up with a higher body count than 'Straw Dogs'), but it's so much fun along the way, chances are you'll forgive it. It's directed with skill and subtlety, never hitting you over the head with its absurdity, content to place some sight gags in the background. It also has cinema's coolest ever fancy dress party and a couple of truly great moments of choreography - Penguern's brief fantasy ballet with the object of his affection manages to be very funny, incredibly sweet and also superbly danced, all with a completely straight face, while the fancy dress dance number in the end credits is great fun.

This Canadian DVD comes with French soundtrack and optional English subtitles, but no extras. The main titles are masked at 2.35:1 but the main feature is presented 1.85:1.

Average customer rating:

A masterpiece, for those who can handle it....
Hopperesque
Simply awful
I feel like going to the bathroom
The Horror (~ real police work in action)

Humanité [Region 2]
Starring: Emmanuel Schotté , Séverine Caneele , Philippe Tullier , Ghislain Ghesquère , and Ginette Allegre
Director: Bruno Dumont
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00004VXSW

Customer Reviews:

A masterpiece, for those who can handle it...........2006-09-04

Hopperesque.......2005-02-04

Simply awful.......2004-11-26

I feel like going to the bathroom.......2004-06-16

The Horror (~ real police work in action).......2004-05-22

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