L'Humanité

Our DVD Price: £7.99 RRP: £19.99 Save £12.00 (60%)   special offer A fine selection of World Cinema from just £6.99! click for details Availability This product should be despatched within 7 days.  This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times   Earn 35 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Film Description

When an 11-year-old girl is brutally raped and murdered in a quiet French village, a police dectective who has forgotten how to feel emotions investigates the crime, which raises more questions than it answers. An ambitious mood piece that was a provocative winner of 3 awards at Cannes.

Film Information

DVD Extras

Trailer; Production Notes; Director biography.

Technical Details

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by Howard Schumann on 22nd March 2006

In L'Humanite, by Bruno Dumont, Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotte) is a Police Superintendent called upon to investigate the murder and rape of an 11-year old girl. Flaunting almost every cinematic convention, the film is not about solving a crime but a 2 1/2-hour poem of mood, time, silence and spirit. Set in northern France in the director's hometown of Bailleul, the characters are unglamorous members of the working class. Dumont simply observes Pharaon going about his life: eating an apple, tending his garden, watching a soccer game on television, interacting with his mother, or being a friend to his neighbor Domino (Severine Caneele), a rugged factory worker and her bus-driver boyfriend Joseph (Philippe Tullier). He is an unlikely cop, a passive, stoop-shouldered, and empathetic man who would sooner kiss a prisoner on the lips or stroke his neck as browbeat him.

As the film opens, a man is walking in the distance alone across a grassy hill. Suddenly as the camera moves in for a close-up, he collapses in the mud and just lays there for a while. Is he dead or alive? Did he commit the crime? In the next scene, he is sitting in his car listening to harpsichord music and we discover that he is a policeman talking in a barely audible voice to his superior. L'Humanite is an involving and disturbing film that you cannot feel lukewarm about. It is profoundly moving with a conclusion as perplexing as the beginning with an ambiguous resolution.What I do know is that I felt as vitally alive watching this film. L'Humanite continually forces us to question what we are looking at and, as the title suggests, keeps bringing us closer and closer to the core of what makes us truly human.

View more reviews by Howard Schumann

Browse all Film Reviews

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

The Sorrow and the Pity

by Marcel Ophuls

Les Enfants Du Paradis

by Marcel Carné

Last Year in Marienbad

by Alain Resnais

Hidden

by Michael Haneke

La Regle du Jeu

by Jean Renoir

Other films by...

More films directed by Bruno Dumont

La Vie de Jesus (Masters of Cinema)

Flanders

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail