Flandres

Mirroring the angst-ridden cop in L‘Humanité who can‘t bear to contemplate the world‘s evil, pretty teenage Barbe is a hyper-sensitive farm girl in love with the brutish-looking, inarticulate young farmer André. His inability to acknowledge any human feelings in their relationship beyond their swift, wordless couplings in the woods leads the equally non-verbal Barbe into the arms of other men. Dumont has proven over time he will always choose intensity over realism. In any case, when these simple country folk open the emotional floodgates in the end, the impact is exponentially greater. (Deborah Young) I do not want to build. I destroy and deform. In this deformation, expression occurs. If I did not deform, the viewer would see reality as it is but, this reality wouldn’t teach him anything.The filmmaker has to twist reality to deform it; when you twist it, the viewer is squeezed and challenged. (Bruno Dumont)