L’Humanité (1999)

L’Humanité is a French crime film first released in 1999, directed by Bruno Dumont.  The film stars Emmanuel Schotté, Séverine Caneele, Philippe Tullier, Ghislain Ghesquère and Ginette Allegre.  It has also been released under the title: Humanité.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


In a town on the north coast of France, a sensitive young police inspector, Pharaon de Winter, investigates the rape and murder of an 11 year old girl.  After the tragic death of his wife and baby, Pharaon lives alone with his mother and has difficulty coping with the evil he sees in the world.  He is secretly in love with a young factory girl, Domino, and he often accompanies her and her over-sexed boyfriend Joseph when they go out.  Like his grandfather, a locally renowned artist, Pharaon looks for beauty in the world, but all too often what he sees in unremittingly ugly...

After his stunning first film in 1997, La Vie de Jésus, Bruno Dumont was expected to produce another work of comparable insight and originality, and the critics were not disappointed.  His second work, L’Humanité, is a remarkable film centred around one man who, through a tragic event in his own life, has become detached from the world and, as a result, experiences an acute sensitivity to all the ills he witnesses.

The film offers Dumont the perfect opportunity to explore humanitarian themes, indeed to ask the provocative question what humanity is, and he does this in a style which is reminiscent of that of one of the Twentieth century’s most humanitarian directors, Robert Bresson.

The film’s compelling cinematography is at the same time visually attractive and repulsive, often violently so (for example, the close up on the mutilated body at the start of the film).  The spectator is forced to see the world through de Winter’s’eyes, and whilst we occasionally glimpse beauty, it is frequently eclipsed by an unexpected blemish which totally ruins the experience.

Using non-professional actors, which includes the superlative Emmanuel Schotté, and avoiding studio filming, Dumont is clearly aiming for a realistic effect, which he reinforces by constantly drawing our attention to insignificant details, putting the film’s main plot of a murder investigation firmly in the background.  This approach works mainly because of the quality of the cinematography, which is sometimes mesmerising (although the frequently recurring explicit sex scenes quickly become an irritation).  However, it is probably on Schotté’s performance that the film’s success rests.   Rarely is an actor seen to portray the essence of  a wounded soul so realistically and so poignantly.  When Schotté is seen crying, you really do want to reach out and hug him.  He is perfectly cast for a role which most professional actors would find impossible to take on.

Not surprisingly, the film has met with general approval from the critics, particularly after it won the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1999. Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele were also rewarded at the same film festival for their performances in the film.

This is not a film for all tastes.  Dumont’s brand of minimalist cinematography is some considerable distance from standard mainstream cinema, and the lack of a strong central narrative and familiar actors will no doubt prevent it from achieving popular commercial success.  Nevertheless, this is a film which is worth seeing and which many with a taste for the unusual will find thought-provoking and even enjoyable.  There is little doubt that it is a work of great artistic merit and it would not be too great an exaggeration to label it as a masterpiece.

© James Travers 2002

For further information see:
Dennis Grunes essay

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