or together, the crackling sound of their steps brushing against grass, fallen twigs and leaves or sand as they walk up and down
hills and dales, the sound of the wind,
the sea, the birds and the occasionally the sound of shot guns.
As the film opens, we see a wooden door. A hand knocks on it. No one answers. We hear only the sound of a dog barking. The camera pans and zooms out and we see some broken down sheds, an old farm tractor and some hay and other farm implements lying on the ground and a wooden dwelling. The man walks away along a country road, reflective. He continues until he comes to a roadside shed. There, an innocent looking teenage girl with pierced metal rings on her ears, wearing a woolen sweat shirt and sweater was waiting, apparently shivering from the cold. She looks at him. He looks back at her and asks her if she was OK. She nods, They walk away. They go through some woods, some bushes and come to what looks like an abandoned quarry pit. In the centre of the sand pit, there is a tiny low half-finished brick wall upon which hang what looks like a few items of old clothes. They go down, without talking. When there, the man lights a fire with twigs. They look at the sky. They kneel down. They appear to be praying but in silence. We do not see any movement of their lips. After a short while, they rise. The man walks towards a water tower in the distance, goes in, picks up a gun and they return to the sandpitm, kneel down and pray again and then walk back to the houses we see at the opening scene,again in silence. When they are there, they hide behind a wall, waiting, the man's rifle raised towards the entrance of the shed about a hundred feet away. They continue waiting. A man finally emerges. The first man pulls the trigger. The second man falls. They walk away.
When the girl returns with the man, we see some policeman with the girl's mother in the distance. The girl observes them, then approaches, gives a slight squeeze on her mother's shoulder. When they are inside the house, sitting at the dinner table, the mother says that she is sorry for "he" did to her. The girl is silent and expressionless. Her mother continues to cry. From then on we see various scenes in which the man would drop by everyday to pick up a sandwich which the girl prepares for him and hands over to him through a slit at the entrance door and sometimes they would walk out together to their favorite rendezvous place, the sandpit by the windy sand dunes and watch the sea together and sometimes, the man would hunt some game with his rifle hidden in the water tower. He accidentally shot a deer when he was aiming at a bird and when he saw the deer convulsing in its dying pains, he put the deer out of misery by stoning its head with a rock, with a "stony" face..
One time, when they were sitting together, the girl asks the man to kiss her. He refuses. She asks why. He simply says no. Another time, they were spotted by a the forest guard of the protected national park property who ask them to leave. They ignore him. Another time, when the girl is there alone, the guard comes down to ask her if he can go out with her. She refuses. On a third occasion, when the guard (Christophe Bon) finds the girl alone at that sand pit, he says he wishes to kiss the girl. The girl act as if she did not hear and he kisses her. She does not reject. When the girl tells the man what the guard did, we find the guard beaten dead by the man in the woods. The man apparently also possesses some mysterious powers. He was sought out by a fat village woman when she found her daughter in a state of stupor, as if possessed by some evil spirit. The man enters her house and when he leaves, the girl was alright again. The fat woman thanked him profusely. We do not know what he did. A second time, when the girl was again possessed, he held her down and kissed her on the mouth and after that, the girl was normal again. A third time, there was a fire at the outskirts of the village. The girl told the man she did not like the sight of it. He took her to a small reservoir and asked her to walk through the path formed by the narrow top of a partitioning wall dividing the reservoir into two parts. As she walked, the fire abated and even went out completely when she successfully completed the perilous journey A fourth time, the man was accosted by a lone teenage female hiker on her way to Boulogne, offered the man a beer and asked if he wanted to fuck her. He did not object. The girl undressed. He did so but she foamed at the mouth as if she were dead and passed over but later revived. In the course of the lovemaking, she left some scratches on the body of the man. When the girl saw them when he next met him, he explained he got scratched in the woods. The girl smiled knowingly.
The girl goes out to the pit to look for the man again at dawn. He is sleeping at the sandpit. After adjusting a log at the dying fire, the girl leaves, thinking. On the way back, she stops, stares at some bushes. The next we know, we see an ambulance and the ambulance men carrying a body out from the woods and the girl's crying mother. The girls body is laid down on a white sheet with two long white candles at the side inside a room at her home. When her mother leaves the house for some business, the man enters. He takes the body carefully out to the side of a pond near to where they used to sit together, lays her down, prays and then leaves. Shortly afterwards, we see the girl resurrected, coughing and rubbing her eyes upon the same white sheet at the side of the life giving pond. .
When the surrealistic film ends, we see the man walking with a backpack and a dog, which used to bark ferociously at him and which used to belong to a fat man in the village whom the girl previously told him she did not like who for some reasons, the police suspected was the murderer of the girl's step-father and had been led away in the police van.
It's a very enigmatic film. I do not know what Dumont is trying to say or if he is interested in saying anything at all. We are only given vague and ambiguous clues, hints, suggestions and never really know why the man has those strange powers nor why he goes to and leaves that village and why he never touches the girl who is obviously in love with him. We do not even know the name of any of the characters in the film. All we got are magnificent panoramic images of the barren and desolate seaside marshland with its high sand dunes, its streamlets, its ponds, its skies, its woods, its clouds, its sunsets, its seas, its bushes and the worshipful attitude the man and the girl take towards them as if the fire, the wind, the earth and the water had some mysterious regenerative powers in them. The man certainly looks a bit like the traditional image of Jesus! After all, Dumont did make a film in 1997 called "the Life of Jesus". Is he an outsider "Jesus" figure who would not hesitate to turn violent but only against people who tarnishes the innocence of young girls? Or is he merely a shaman of some kind of primitive folk religion? Is the water tower by the sea where the man hides his shotgun a phallic symbol (the girl leans against its wall listening to music and it rises starkly against the sky amidst lush green bushes)? Is the countryside filled with lush green plants a symbol of feminine passivity or power? Is he trying to say that violence may have its use? Is the girl drawn towards the man because of such mystique? Is he an angel in the guise of the devil? Is he trying to explore the ambiguous boundaries between what is conventionally regarded as good and evil? Is it "hors Satan" or "Dehors! Satan!"? I really don't know.
沒有留言:
張貼留言