Twentynine Palms

Starring:Yekaterina Golubeva, David Wissak
Director: Bruno Dumont
Studio: Wellspring
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com,

No one can accuse director Bruno Dumont of taking the easy road. Dumont's Life of Jesus and L'Humanite are fascinating, but they test the comfort zone of even the most devoted art-house maven. Twentynine Palms serves up more of Dumont's uncompromising rigor, this time set in America. A couple scout locations in the desert around Joshua Tree, and spend most of their time fighting or having sex. The frankness of the director's approach to sex does not prepare one for the shock of the truly bleak final reels. This Last Tango in Zabrieskie Point has a lulling, creepy power before it reaches those shocks, although actors David Wissak and Katia Golubeva are perhaps not as compelling as Dumont wants them to be. Of course, he's showing empty people traversing one of the emptiest places on earth--so maybe it fits. In any case, this film will shake you if you stick with it. --Robert Horton

Description

From Bruno Dumont, one of the leading visionaries of world cinema, comes Twentynine Palms, a mesmerizing story of love, sex and evil set deep in the Joshua Tree desert. While scouting for a photo shoot location, an American photographer (David Wissak) and his Russian/French girlfriend (Katia Golubeva) spend their days engaging in impassioned fights, hasty reconciliations and frequent bouts of sex, until a shocking act of desperation leads to an unforeseen and brutal climax. DVD extras include: 5.1 Extraction, Trailer, Interview with Director, EPK, Making of Reel, Subtitle Control

Customer Reviews:

Surreal movie with a wacked ending.......2007-06-14

Lots of reviews of this film have noted its pointlessness and in all fairness, there's a lot of truth to these reviews. One of the most grating things is the director's incredibly high-falutin' ostensibly philosophical explanation/description of what he was trying to do when he made the movie, which he "reveals" (for lack of a better term) in an interview. Unfortunately, it's very pretentious sounding.

That being said, there's an interesting parallel here to another "two souls lost in a huge barren place" movie, "Gerry" by Gus Van Sant. "Gerry" is a really interesting film, I think, and there are some intriguing similarities. But the Van Sant film really probes its two same-named characters, while the Domont film, "Twentynine Palms" spends a lot of time with its two characters engaged in back and forth stuff.

So why the three stars? Good question. The back and forth stuff consists of alternating bickering and sex and, at least for me, it felt like there was some weird kind of atmosphere building up as a result of this. As in the Van Sant film, there are fairly long stretches of the two characters traveling (in "Gerry", by foot; in "Twentynine Palms", by car) with little else happening. It's during the traveling that we feel the complete emptiness of the relationship. The reason, though, that I gave "Gerry" four stars is that the relationship has some depth, is palpable, emotionally reverberates, while in the Dumont film, that's not the case.

In spite of this pronounced shallowness, though, there's something going on and it ain't good. There IS a slowly creeping malaise that you do begin to feel, minute by minute, and in fact, I think Dumont does a reasonably good job at this.

The problem is that this creeping malaise is shattered with a double blast (not literally a blast, as in shotgun, but referring to an outburst) of violence at the end of the film, making it, I would say, not so much pointless, but more like a huge doofy cartoon. The cartoonishness in particular is emphasized in the totally bizarre getup one of the characters sports in the penultimate scene.

It kind of feels like the reason Dumont chose this really wacked out ending was to emphasize how America is the land of random personal violence. But the problem with that is, that point's already been made in a bunch of films. I think what he should have done is to build on the creepiness he started and instead of hitting us over the head with an outrageously cartoonish ending, move the characters to some kind of bizarre climax that much more naturally develops as a result of the buildup. I guess he just couldn't control himself.

Too bad. This really should have, I would say, two and a half stars, but maybe I was feeling generous. The creepiness is done relatively well. But the ending totally destroys it.

Too pointless to review.......2007-05-08

This couldn't have been released in theaters. I couldn't imagine it.

If you find that you have to watch this movie, here are 3 points of advice:
1. Get control of the remote to fast forward through the long pointless scenes and the almost never ending static shots.
2. Watch it on a large TV. Apparently they blew all of their money on leasing the Hummer and didn't have enough left over for a zoom lens. There are plenty of static long distance shots where it's a mystery as to where one is supposed to be looking. Hint, watch for movement.
3. Bring something else to do while it's on.

I wasn't actually able to take watching all of this thing, so maybe I missed the "good" stuff. I can say however that ending isn't part of the possibly missed good stuff.

This movie made me feel a little guilty. After watching this, I think I owe Eragon at least another star. There was some nice scenery it that one at least. The amazon scale should go something like 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars in order to properly rate the trash.

If Blockbuster had a "Pointless" section (between Mystery & Romance of course), this movie would be in it.

Not For Everyone.......2007-05-03

Let me preface this by saying that I am not keenly familiar with the work of Bruno Dumont. I know he's experimental and he could care less about narrative or content guidelines and all that fancy indie cred...I get it, he is a guy who makes movies on his own terms. The problem with that is if one of your films gets some of the attention that Twentynine Palms has from the uninitiated, or those of us who are accustomed to more conventional movies, and you have a whole bunch of people pissing on your misunderstood work. I think of a conversation I had with a film student about Peter Greenaway's The Falls. They saw it and hated it, but unfortunately for them it was the only Greenaway film they had seen, so they sort of missed the point...actually, they didn't even get the context Greenaway was making his point in. I suspect that is what's happened here.

Twentynine Palms has a narrative and it is somewhat palpable to a mainstream audience...especially one that it is eager to be shocked. Dumont tells the story of Photographer David and his French girlfriend Katia having sex and examining the beautiful landscapes of southwestern United States after leaving Los Angeles. The pacing of the film and the pretty consistent nudity and sexual content allow us to engage the characters on an intimate level and sort of enjoy the peace, or at least silence, they exist in during this road trip (mind you this is not nearly as explicit as people say it is...its just two naked people who don't even look really great naked anyway). They seem disconnected and somewhat isolated throughout. It actually reaches a level of character depth I don't think dialogue can often reach...to me it's kind of the advantage movies have over other mediums. The content during the film up to this point is what makes the film so real and believable and it did this without me really noticing its purpose. Everything is pretty ordinary with these people, but why is Dumont showing us this?

He is setting the stage for what turns out to be a very disruptive tragedy that befalls these two people. The way we are set up is what makes the film so filthy and profoundly dark. You have to really watch these characters the whole time to get the full effect, but I'm not so sure everyone in the audience wants this film to cut that deeply. There is a clear a message here and every scene assists in giving the conclusion deeper meaning.

Dumont has not created an anti-American film necessarily and he definitely doesn't set out to conquer Hollywood. He's simply made a film that tries to simulate tragedy and gives us the rare opportunity to empathize. This film is probably only really worth experiencing for a select few who can appreciate it. The rest of us should probably pass.

State of Nature; Off the Haters.......2007-04-08

It's probably inevitable that this film would garner brickbats from the insensitive and the ADD crowd. Its central proposition is that human beings are fundamentally selfish, violent, and above all irrational, preferring to work out their angst at a meaningless and random existence via brutality against weaker targets, even -- especially -- the ones they purport to love. This is hardly feel-good movie of the weak material, and anyway deliberate pacing went out of fashion in mainstream American cinema somewhere around the time that Hollywood realized box-office mojo meant catering to the low tastes of fourteen-year old boys (so say circa 1980). Dumont's commercial viability certainly isn't helped any by his preference for deliberately and flagrantly aggressing against the audience's sense of narrative propriety instead of holding its hand while dropping a Rohypnol in its Pepsi.

However, I posit that what the negative reviews here call "boredom" is in fact a measured but relentless slow build worthy of Hitchock, fabricated by Dumont out of the banal materials of daily life in the Great American Desert and reflecting his innate Gallic nausea at the all-pervasive fear and isolation of human existence in that ultimate Hobbesian cesspool; the place where small fish die gasping. The gorgeous cinematography and compositions of the desert, both natural and man-made, around Palm Springs are almost incidental -- or are they?

Joseph Conrad once wrote that he had no need of injecting supernatural horror into his tales because human beings alone were capable of every manner of wickedness imaginable; just so. Yes, Twentynine Palms is ultimately a shaggy dog story (with a missing leg), and repeat viewings will never live up to the first, but it's still a film only a Frenchman would have the guts to make. A modern classic.

Aghghhhhh, this is awful!.......2006-10-07

This has got to be one of the worst films I've ever seen. The characters are pointless and one-dimensional. The guy is a jerk and inspires no sympathy. They have sudden fights over apparently nothing. In fact, there is no cause-and-effect in this movie at all! Things just happen randomly for no apparent reason. There's no real story. The takes are boring; most scenes hum along endlessly making for quite boring viewing. The violent ending wasn't even believable! Instead of inspiring any kind of shock or sympathy, I was left just thinking "what the...???" Really, really pointless all around.

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