L'Humanite (DVD)

L,HUMANITE....Artificail Eye films.1999 Renting French films is like going to the dogtrack. Everyone knows whose going to win the race before hand but you may occasionally pick a wrong un. And Humanite` is that whippet that hasn’t got mustard on its tuckers. It’s a bleak look at small town French life centered around an unrealistically shy police detective and his voyeuristic relationship with the dim useless young working class couple next door. After a failed marriage and a lost child the thirtysomething going nowhere copper who lives with his mum is put on a case of child murder. This effects him greatly seeing a young child mutilated ...  Read the complete review

L'Humanite, recent winner of the Cannes film festival, is not an easy film to categorise. Right from the outset you have a sense that this is a film which could only have been made outside Hollywood. The best way to describe it is as an anti-detective movie: the lead character is a hopeless Superintendant in a French backwater, haunted by the horrific rape and murder of an 11 year old girl. One of the film's opening shots shows her mutilated vagina. Is this a justifiable part of the plot or just for shock value? A little of both. Although the film is undoubtably beautifully shot, what little plot there is moves forward at an incredibly slow pace. ...  Read the complete review