La Vie de Jésus (Bruno Dumont, 1997)
Cast: David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel, Kader Chaatouf, Sébastien Delbaare, Samuel Boidin, Steve Smagghe, Sébastien Bailleul, Geneviève Cottreel. Screenplay: Bruno Dumont. Cinematography: Philippe Van Leeuw. Production design: Frédérique Suchet. Film editing: Yves Deschamps, Guy Lecorne. Music: Richard Cuvillier.
From its enigmatic title to its uncompromising lack of narrative structure, Bruno Dumont's first feature challenges a viewer's patience but ultimately, I think, rewards it. Dumont has explained (sort of) the title as a reference to Ernest Renan's 1863 book of the same name, a biography of Jesus that purges all miracles and holiness from its story. There are no miracles or holiness to be found in the life of Freddy, a young lout growing up in a small town in northern France, where his mother keeps a bar and occasionally nags him about his idleness. It's the kind of town where people spend a lot of time sitting on their front stoops or staring at the television. Freddy spends his time with his chums, riding motorbikes around the countryside, playing drums in the town band, having sex with his pretty girlfriend, and raising a caged finch that he enters in chirping contests. The finch's frantic movements in its confinement may be a kind of metaphor for the turmoil behind Freddy's usually impassive façade, which shatters only when he experiences one of the epileptic attacks that send him to therapy. Naturally, so much aimlessness gets Freddy into serious trouble, but the film ends with only a symbolic redemption as he escapes from police interrogation, rides into the country, and lies in the tall grass, staring into the sky and starting to cry. The bleakness of Dumont's vision of the life of Freddy and his cohort of fellow layabouts can be trying, and Dumont makes no attempt to leaven his story with humor. Yet I found myself drawn in by the performances of a group of nonprofessional actors, and I appreciated Dumont's references in a Criterion interview to his film as a kind of equivalent to Flemish paintings of idling peasants and burghers.
