A FREE SOUL (Clarence Brown, 1931)

Although it was a huge financial success that assisted Clark Gable’s rise to stardom (and no wonder, given the riveting nature of his virile, lowlife performance), and although its director, Clarence Brown, and star, Norma Shearer, were Oscar-nominated, and Lionel Barrymore in fact won the best actor Oscar, A Free Soul is a perfectly dreadful film. I’ve liked some things that Brown has done, including a few Garbo films and, later, Intruder in the Dust (1949), but in truth I like the Garbo films for Garbo and Intruder for the fine acting of Juano Hernandez, Elizabeth Patterson and Claude Jarman, Jr., the wide-eyed boy whom Brown had directed to an Oscar in The Yearling (1946). I don’t have the urge, let me tell you, to study Brown’s mise-en-scène. What’s to look at in his films, I ask. I concede an expressive shot or two in his 1935 Anna Karenina, but apart from this it’s worth recalling Andrew Sarris’s exhilarating comment that Garbo was always her own mise-en-scène.

Basically, I feel that lawyers are among the scum of the earth. A Free Soul shows me nothing that might lead me to revise this appraisal. Shearer, not an actress I like apart from her striking Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934—and even there she is out-acted by Fredric March, Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Sullivan), plays Jan Ashe, a “modern” single gal intent on living by her own rules—a selfish indulgence that her father’s wealth helps permit. Stephen Ashe is a celebrated defense attorney (hence, on a scale of scum a little less scummy than prosecuting attorneys) and a dipsomaniac, as a result of which—I am referring to the booze—both he and his daughter have been somewhat excluded by their upper-class relations. (In the peculiar world of this film, apparently, it’s unusual for society people to drink a lot.) Anyhow, the family situation has helped father and daughter Ashe, who live together, to become extremely close; they are indeed alike in willfulness and irritating pride, and they provide each other with emotional support. (The hint of incestuous attachment is safely deflected by the fact that Jan has a beau. But, of course, so long as there isn’t a marriage, the delay itself adds spark to the otherwise dim hint.)

The Ashes, then, are used to finding themselves on the same side—vis-à-vis at least most other Ashes. However, that’s about to change. Stephen is currently defending a mobster of murder; it appears that Ace Wilfong clumsily left his hat at the scene of the crime. Stephen’s courtroom tricks and summary appeal to the jury, though, get Ace acquitted. Drunk, Stephen brings Ace to a family function so that someone else there can be even more of a fish out of water than he. Jan, who already took a shine to Ace in court (after all, he looks like Clark Gable), now leaves with Ace. It isn’t long before she has broken off her engagement to polo player Dwight Winthrop (Leslie Howard—in actuality a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who grew up impoverished in a London ghetto) and has become Ace’s mistress. “I object!” her lawyer-dad in effect declares, and only her father’s alcoholism distracts Jan from her new and dangerous romance. Father and daughter go off together to provide Stephen with a country cure, but it doesn’t stick and eventually Jan is back humming and slumming with Ace as Dad sinks deeper and deeper into the long stupor that is his life. Ace increasingly holds Jan as his slave, constantly degrading her and smacking her up. Female audiences didn’t hold this against Ace too much because (1) they enjoyed vicariously the thrill of Gable’s hunky domination, and (2) who gives a damn about Norma Shearer? Leslie Howard, apparently! Dwight drops his polo stick long enough to pack a rod and do Ace in. Since it’s really all his fault for having gotten Ace off in the first place, Stephen pulls himself together to defend Dwight. He does a helluva job.

The whole thing couldn’t be sillier. Gable and Howard—future Gone with the Wind-ers—are fine and, truth to tell, Shearer and Barrymore do nuanced work; but what difference does their acting make when the latter two possess such thoroughly obnoxious personalities? Why write about this high-toned trash at all?

Well, two reasons. One is the distinction that the film makes between wealth and class, the economic and the social, a theme that provides the film with at least a patina of seriousness and significance. The other is a footnote. Let me start the footnote in this way: Johnny Cochran saw this film. Recall the dropped hat at the murder scene that put Ace on trial in the first place? His initials were inside the hat. Stephen very cleverly suggests to the jury other names to which the initials “A.W.” might correspond. And do you know what Stephen Ashe does then? He has Ace try on the hat in open court. It’s too small for Ace, who, quite eerily in retrospect, mugs his way through pretending to try to pull the hat down into a comfortable fit.

“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.”

But in the beginning was the hat.

NOWHERE IN AFRICA (Caroline Link, 2001)

Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika), which won an Oscar as the best foreign-language film of 2002, portrays the actual experiences of a Jewish family that fled Germany in 1938, after Kristallnacht, and settled in Kenya. It’s an attractive accomplishment. Its contribution to cinema touching on the Holocaust is, however, negligible.

Kristallnacht was an officially sanctioned event of street crime throughout Germany; on the night of November 9, rampaging mobs freely assaulted Jews, their homes and businesses, leaving streets littered with broken glass. Nowhere in Africa refers to the too few Jews who, fearing for their safety, drastically relocated. A German film by Caroline Link, it derives from an autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig (a pen-name, one hopes). Walter Redlich is a lawyer; he, his wife, Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter uproot themselves, accepting the arrangements made on their behalf by a family friend already in Kenya. Regina, the child, is based on Zweig.

The opening movement promises a superior film. The African landscapes, gorgeously photographed by Gernot Roll, are suspended between daunting strangeness and exotic dreaminess. The long shots, the panoramic views of these vistas, imply memory. Voiceover—the adult Regina—begins, “I could not really remember Germany.” Regina now flashes back to Germany, remembering her and her mother playing in the snow, allowing, with tantalizing ambiguity, for one of three possibilities: that Regina recalled more than she is now admitting; that she has recalled things better since; that she is, at least partially, making things up. Back to Rongai, Kenya. At a basic level of “setting the scene,” Link knows what she is doing.

The film opens with the arrival in Rongai of Jettel and Regina, Walter having preceded them in order to secure their rented cabin and begin the work as a tenant farmer for which he is ill-suited. (He doesn’t even know how to dig and construct a well.) It’s plain that Walter is miserable in this new life of his, but because he is less miserable than Jettel he is able to “act off” her discontent in order to shore up his resolve to acclimate and adjust. Jettel, who longs to return home to family, will not even permit her good, patterned china to be unpacked. She is sure that all danger to Jews will quickly pass in Germany. Meanwhile, we take in the fuller view of her mind afforded by the fact that she did pack up this china and bring it along with her. Walter has no delusions about returning home anytime soon and worries about the fate of his father, whom he was unable to persuade to leave Germany and join them. The Redliches will not return until a few years after the war, at which point the Holocaust has occurred and both Walter and Jettel have lost their loved ones in Germany. Through connections, the Redliches have followed some of the turmoil that happened in Germany in their absence—a stark contrast to the refugees in the documentary Shanghai Ghetto (Dana Janklowicz-Mann, Amir Mann, 2002), who didn’t learn of the Holocaust until the end of the war.

Whites subject the Redliches, including Regina, to some of the anti-Semitism that they would have experienced at home. They are considered unwelcome visitors. Kenyan natives embrace and befriend them, except Jettel when she makes demands for favors and services to which her bourgeois experience, she feels, entitles her but runs counter to the hard work routinely performed by the Kenyan women. (For instance, she demands that a black male servant carry buckets of water for her from the community hole.) Jettel is so abrupt and insensitive to the natives that her spouse chides her, saying that she acts toward these black Kenyans in the manner of “people you should not want to be compared to.” He is referring to the way Aryans treat Jews in Germany. For her part, little Regina is blissfully and warmheartedly open to the natives and her own African experience.

In the best instance of dialogue in the film, Regina upon entering a schoolroom is meanly greeted by the teacher, who says, “So you’re the little Jewish girl.” “Yes,” the child replies, “I’m Jewish,” in effect retaliating against the anti-Semite’s presumption with a subtle and sharp correction. The moment doesn’t seem rhetorical. Regina is years older than when she arrived in Kenya, and from the start she is precocious. The moment belongs to her, and it does seem that she might actually have responded with this Jane Eyre-ish wit.

Superb acting comes from Juliane Köhler, who plays Jettel, whose attitudes about Kenya and black Africans hearteningly change throughout the process of her adjustment to the reality of her situation. But, for me at least, the film most falters with its presentation of her character. Marital quarrels and infidelity—Jettel takes up with the family friend who arranged for their coming to Kenya—plunge the action into dismal soap opera. It scarcely matters that the film may be hewing to a set of factual occurrences; all this ultra-dramatic nonsense cheapens the material and shifts the focus away from the European developments for which the Redliches’ African relocation should be a constant and haunting reminder.

I appreciate the purpose of this vulgar marital melodrama. We are being reminded that, in addition to dealing with the Holocaust, the Redliches are subject to all the other unpleasant stuff in life with which other bourgeois must contend. Jews are people after all. Link may find this a humane take on things, but others would be justified in labeling her perspective condescending in the extreme. The film stresses the likelihood that the couple’s marital difficulties are in part pressured by their current circumstance, which in turn derives from the Jewish (and other) tragedies in Europe. One can draw this connection intelligently, but, in the meantime, one must wade through the melodrama. The Redliches’ marital woes constitute a ridiculous, even at times an offensive aspect of the film. And how it does go on. When the couple finally reconciles, one is apt to wish to have been spared the whole ordeal of their “Bickering Bickersons” routine.

Gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence have no place in serious cinema. However, there’s also such a thing as too little sex when sex isn’t gratuitous. When official word comes that the war is over, the Redliches make love; but Link gives the celebratory sex short (and too fancily artistic) shrift. It would have been much more powerful had she shown the sexual act between these reconciled partners from start to finish. Doing this would not have made voyeurs of us (if that was Link’s reservation) but would have given us time for the momentousness to sink in. In part, Link’s dashing through this all-important sexual event is strategic, to provide emphasis for a subsequent instance of the Redliches’ lovemaking that produces the fetus with which they return to Germany. That moves “the story” along, to be sure, but the sex celebrating the end of war is of far more thematic relevance and importance. Again, the second instance of sex is somewhat artily drawn.

The Redliches return to Germany only because Walter, as an attorney, wants to participate in the construction of a new system of justice in West Germany. By this point, Jettel considers Kenya her home and is, additionally, incensed that Walter has made arrangements for their return without consulting her. (Some choice: token consultation or no consultation.) Neverthetheless, we presume that the Redliches will remain happy with one another.

Those who are, perhaps, most likely to embrace Link’s film are filmgoers who enjoy visual storytelling allied with grand and beautiful visual backdrops. Nowhere in Africa reminds me of later David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago), and it’s likely that those who like Lean’s “epics” will also like Link’s film. I care for neither.

Zweig has voiced her own reservations, especially on the point of Link’s inability to understand the kind of Jewish family to which she belonged. Let me quote the author: “We were not Orthodox, but we have always been traditional Jews, and that was what . . . Link didn’t understand, and I was trying to explain it to her but she didn’t know what I was talking about. I have always been somebody who honors my parents by keeping the holidays, for example.” In other ways, too, Link may have found the project upon which she embarked beyond her grasp.

In addition to the Oscar, Nowhere in Africa won the German Film Award as best film and the FIPRESCI Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, whose citation reads as follows: “For its unusual narrative and historical perspectives on the international reverberations of World War II.”

SLIM (Ray Enright, 1937)

A few years prior to Joris Ivens’s stunning Power and the Land (1940), a documentary about New Deal rural electrification, Warner Bros. released Slim, written by William Wister Haines from his 1934 novel, about two power linemen, seasoned Red and his surrogate son, orphaned farm boy Slim—itinerants, moving from construction site to construction site. A graduate of Joe E. Brown comedies, director Ray Enright does a light, quick job of juggling Depression Americana, Leftist sentiment about workers, a romantic triangle (both Red and Slim are in love with the same woman, a nurse), a touch of melodrama about a lineman who, jealous of Red, tries to make a work “accident” happen to him, and a couple of good doses of heartstopping excitement, including a conclusive one in which linemen work near “hot” wires in order to restore power that has been knocked out by a snowstorm. Indeed, Slim might best be described as a mix of prose and poetry: a perilously above-the-ground actioner and an anthem to labor. (A stirring preface dedicates the film to power linemen.) There is also comic relief provided by Stu Erwin, whose girlfriend is played (briefly) by a young, beauteous Jane Wyman.

All the major and major minor characters are exceptionally decent. Pat O’Brien plays Red (a nickname of no discernible origin), Margaret Lindsay plays Cally, the nurse, and J. Farrell MacDonald plays Pop, the boss of the crew to which Red initially and ultimately belongs—the man who hires Slim. An accident creates the opening that permits the boy’s hiring; a fatal accident enables his promotion to lineman. Another fatal accident reconciles even Cally to the dangers involved. She will no longer try to dissuade Slim from the noble labor he loves to perform, despite all the risks. In the lead role, Henry Fonda is achingly decent, honest and honorable—a kid one really roots for.

Enright’s camera assumes all necessary positions to convey the danger of the work these men do. I have outlined the film’s text; but the view that the film provides of how unprotected these workers once were creates for us, seventy years later, a meta-text as well: praise for the intervening union activism that brought a measure of safety and sanity to the high-risk job. Text and meta-text easily absorb one another.

Something else is implicit that ennobles the film and gives it gravitas: a sense of shared community. We watch the men work, and it is for their fellow citizens that they do this work. The agency of this connection is the woman who runs the boarding house where the crew is staying at the time of the final job. She wants her lights back on! And thanks to Slim and company, she will get her lights back on.

The closing image of a lineman mounting a pole to help get this job done is heart-walloping.

PARADISE NOW (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005)

A cynical attempt to put a human face on expedient, remorseless killing, Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now is a monstrous mirage in the desert, and a lame piece of work by any standard. Two Palestinians from Nablus, auto mechanics in their twenties, embark on a murder-suicide plot hatched by higher-ups in the unnamed terrorist organization to which they belong, targeting a busload of innocent Israelis in Tel Aviv, along with medics and others tending to the wounded and collecting the dead. The director of this tense, soulless thriller is Israeli-born Hany Abu-Assad, a Palestinian living in the Netherlands, who has claimed that he made the film to stimulate discussion and promote peace. Washing more Jewish lives into the mouth of the Holocaust is his true objective. To say the least, this movie will do nothing to hasten the end of Israeli’s West Bank security presence. But then what movie could?

Both boys are likeably goofy, neither is presented as a religious or an ideological fanatic, and both are conspicuously handsome; the warmth of their bond alone assures us that we are meant to side with them, no matter what. But the “matter” here is murder. What is their motive? Although Saïd also has his highly individualized motivation (shame, because his father “collaborated” with Israelis), he speaks for himself and Khaled and the others that they presumably represent. The boys’ motive, apparently, is twofold. One is that Israelis, they feel, have appropriated the status of victim in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute to which they themselves are due. In a sense, therefore, their making martyrs of themselves as suicide-killers is a symbolical attempt to reclaim this status, at least in their own eyes. This part of their motive is undeserving of consideration apart from the obvious observation that it constitutes a degree of self-pity of gargantuan and pathological proportions. The other part is somewhat more interesting. The boys feel that Israeli occupation daily impresses them with irritants and outrages that rob them of their dignity and sense of manhood. Martyrdom is thus seen as a path for redressing this emasculation. They see no other end in sight to their aches and complaints.

There is nothing especially brutal about the occupation as this film (along with other films with a pro-Palestinian bias) portrays it, but one can certainly sympathize with those who are forced under any circumstance to live highly regulated lives. Indeed, the boys’ lot in this regard is inextricable from a political situation that deprives them of self-determination. Deeming themselves miserable, then, the boys may opt for “Paradise” as a means of ending their misery. Abu-Assad’s mise-en-scène stresses another contributor to their disconsolation: poverty. Abu-Assad shows this by contrasting the boys’ dim, cramped homes with bright, energetic Tel Aviv. It is perhaps unnecessary for Abu-Assad to explain that Israeli policies help keep countless Palestinian males out of well-paying jobs in Israel proper.

None of this, of course, justifies killing innocent people. But in the eyes of disaffected Palestinian youth, and Palestinian elders as well, there is no such thing as innocent Jews. Despite the myth that Palestinians and Jews once got along, Palestinian hatred of Jews predates the occupation and even the massive postwar uprooting of Palestinians. It is historic, entrenched.

What is most disturbing about these pro-Palestinian propaganda films, perhaps, is that Palestinian characters decline all self-examination and refuse to accept any responsibility for their own situation. The delusion is disseminated that Israeli occupation is something that Israel has enforced on a whim. The Palestinian argument requires the absence of context, and there is certainly never any mention of the necessity for a Jewish homeland following World War II. Faced with what they feel is the lack of their future, Palestinians are loath to delve into what they regard as “ancient past.” It never seems to occur to them that they have brought occupation on themselves, that they, not Israel, have been the principal impediment to their own political self-determination by the violence they visit on Israelis. They persist in the belief that Israel has no right to exist, that all Jews should be wiped off the face of the earth. They are hell-bent on revenge for each Palestinian death, unwilling to accept that in any reasonable and just universe Israeli security and survival must trump Palestinian comfort and the right to commit acts of mayhem. Nor has Israel, finding itself between a rock and a hard place, always been adept at controlling the cycle of violence that it, too, has had a role in unleashing and maintaining; but that’s a topic for another film—a pro-Israel film.

No one that I know feels other than this: the occupation should end. Where people differ is in their position as to which side has been more responsible for obstructing this outcome. Meanwhile, the upshot of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has hardly inspired confidence in Palestinians, whose corruption and chaos are matched by their hatred of Jews. How does one deal with a neighbor whose paramount wish is your death?

Abu-Assad’s film is deeply distressing. Consider the slight it inflicts on Israel’s Security Fence, through which accomplices of the boys cut the hole from the side of Israel proper that allows the boys to pop through for their killing spree. Palestinians have always had a rightful claim to the argument that Israeli security measures have done little to help keep Israelis alive. Such a claim cannot be extended to the Fence, however, which has demonstrably and dramatically reduced the number of civilian Israeli casualties. Abu-Assad, even way off in Holland, surely knows this. Therefore, he also knows what an affront to the cause of Israeli survival is this little plot detail of his. At least he spares us the current Palestinian paranoia that the erection of the Fence has other motives—ones aiming at Palestinian disadvantage rather than Israeli security. Admittedly, Abu-Assad fills in the hole in the Fence, so to speak, by having Israeli soldiers capture the boys and send them back through the hole to the occupied side from whence they came. There are two reasons for his doing this. One has to do with narrative; the other, with calculated purposes of propaganda. The boys have to be sent back because Abu-Assad has to keep the film going; he needs to nail down its twists and turns of plot. The boys become separated, Khaled desperately tries finding Saïd, and suspense is generated, once Saïd, around whose belly the explosives are strapped, is back on track, as to whether he will execute the mission. (A more contrived plot could not have been devised.) It is the other motive that is even more grating, though. Abu-Assad patches the hole in the Fence, so to speak, in order to lay claim to his being even-handed. No matter the angle of his bias, he wishes to appear straight in order to make his propaganda all the more effective.

He pursues a similar strategy throughout the film. Let me give two other examples. The older member of the organization who recruits the boys for the assignment at hand is an ambiguous figure. It is a possible interpretation that he is manipulating the boys toward the organization’s end. It is also possible, however, that he is doing no such thing. But another instance of this “let’s look even-handed” strategy is far more revealing of the manipulative nature of this despicable film. Saïd has a girlfriend, Suha, who works for a human rights organization that seeks Palestinian rights through nonviolent means. Hers is the alternative to the terrorist cell. Suha and Saïd’s exchanges—debates—are the principal reason there is any suspense as to whether Saïd will carry out the mission; although he has vigorously challenged each one of Suha’s attempts to turn him away from violence, who can say how well Suha’s arguments have privately reached his heart and mind? (And he does love her.) Suha’s position is hysterical: killing Israelis is wrong because it is counterproductive, because it does not truly advance the Palestinian cause, because it only perpetuates the vicious cycle of Israeli-Palestinian retaliations. Since the pair’s quarrels over the matter take up a substantial part of the film (à la Stanley Kramer), the impression is given that these opposing views exhaust the matter. But they are “opposing views” on the same side. No one brings up the possibility that murdering people such as ordinary Israeli citizens is wrong—wrong in itself. What about Saïd’s mother? Since Abu-Assad and co-scenarists Bero Beyer and Pierre Hodgson are so fond of having characters articulate polemical positions, why can’t they have given some other character, such as the mother, the position that killing people is plain wrong? Instead, Mum remains mum throughout the film. Meanwhile, Abu-Assad can say: “Look, I give both sides!” when in fact there are more sides than two associated with the issue. I suppose it is wishing for the moon that some other character—an Israeli in Tel Aviv, perhaps—might explain the whole matter of the occupation from the viewpoint of Israel’s national security.

At the end of the film, his hair cut and beard shaved off so that he can pass for Israeli, Saïd boards a Tel Aviv bus. Guess what? The municipal bus is transporting Israeli soldiers! Abu-Assad squirms out of his own dilemma by making potential victims soldiers rather than women and children, no matter how unrealistic the prospect. Will Saïd do what he is there to do? Will the angels he anticipates escort him into Paradise? (“There is no Paradise, except in your mind,” Suha has told him.) We will never know. The screen goes silent; there’s a tight closeup of Saïd’s impenetrable eyes. Abu-Assad has saved his best shot for the last.

In all ways, nevertheless, Paradise Now is no The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966). It is too rhetorical, propagandistic, manipulative, limp, shallow, unself-examining.

Paradise Now won as best film at Netherlands and won the Amnesty International Film Prize at Berlin. Its screenplay was adjudged the best at the European Film Awards. In the United States, it won both the Independent Spirit Award and the Golden Globe as best foreign-language film, and was likewise named this by the National Board of Review and the critics in Dallas-Fort Worth and Vancouver.

A whole controversy erupted when the film was nominated for the Oscar. The Oscar for best foreign-language film goes to the country of origin, which the Academy determined to be Palestine—a nation that either no longer exists or does not yet exist. This attribution amounted to an unwarranted and insupportable political statement. As it happens, the film’s country of origin is the Netherlands, which submitted a different entry for consideration. (As Italy found out the same year, the Academy doesn’t accept candidates in some other language than that of the country submitting it. Since it’s not in Dutch, Paradise Now wouldn’t have been considered in any case.) The whole episode refreshes one’s skepticism about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

TWENTYNINE PALMS (Bruno Dumont, 2003)

French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s unhyphenated Twentynine Palms has attracted rude controversy. (The Lynchian title clues us into the influence of David Lynch’s phenomenal 1997 Lost Highway.) I have already written about Dumont’s first two films, The Life of Jesus (1997) and Humanity (1999). The former won the Prix Jean Vigo, the International Jury Award at the Sao Paulo International Film Festival, the “Discovery of the Year” European Film Award, the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival, and the FIPRESCI Award at the Chicago International Film Festival; the latter won the Grand Prix, and best actor and best actress for Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele, at Cannes. With Twentynine Palms the prizes stopped. His first two films pegged Dumont as cinema’s heir to Robert Bresson, whose intense materiality yields to intense spirituality in a brace of the finest films ever made. With Twentynine Palms the transcendence stopped. I delayed seeing the film as long as I could just to avoid the quarrels and cruelty that the film has provoked. (J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice, for instance, “Dumont’s taste for the elemental has always flirted with the moronic.”) With Twentynine Palms my defense of Dumont, in the classical sense, hasn’t stopped.

I have no idea what others expected. But the excessive and insupportable violence that is supposed to have marred and mangled Dumont’s third film never, for me, materialized. Having spent Thanksgiving night cringing and averting my eyes as I viewed for the first (and last) time Sam Raimi’s dumb, gory Spider-Man (2002), I must protest that every frame of Dumont’s film is watchable. Its violence, so vividly implied that Dumont scarcely has to show any, is nowhere near the Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) level of gluttony. Twentynine Palms is a good film besides.

One wonders: beneath all the protests against the film’s alleged violence, are people really objecting to the film’s voluminous instances of sexual intercourse between the two main characters, David and Katia, played moodily and combatively by David Wissak and Katia Golubeva? Is it just too much for some to see so much young naked flesh blending in with the rock formations in California’s Joshua Tree National Park?

David is a freelance photographer scouting locations for a shoot. (This experience is based on Dumont’s own as he scouted for locations for an American movie shoot.) Katia is his companion, a high-strung, possessive beauty who would be more congenially matched with someone more sensitive and emotionally responsive than David. The parched desert is the perfect setting for the pair’s bouts of misunderstanding and temperament.

In truth, however, neither David, who is American, nor Katia, who is not, is the film’s protagonist. America itself is the main character. We hear bits and pieces of Dumont’s vision of it as David watches television in the couple’s motel room at Twentynine Palms, their base of shelter away from home. For instance, there is the Jerry Springer episode where a man informs his wife that he has had sex with their daughter. There is George W. Bush, too, on the radio, doing his best to sound presidential about his nasty and pointless war. And, of course, there is the denouement wherein the couple, out in the wilderness, become victims of vicious, predatory strangers out of Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969). The whole thing ends in the bloodbath that is America, where from the top on down people have reason to believe they can get away with anything. The violence that befalls David and Katia may have something to do with their contentiousness as a couple, but not much; rather, the violence randomly interrupts the unpleasant ordinariness of their mutual existence. It is violence that has no other reason for being than a frustrated will to power that demands satisfaction. The anonymity of the violence is like war. The loveliness of Nature in which it erupts sets the myth of America against America’s reality and painfully reminds us all that America was meant for better things than the ways in which it is currently behaving in Iraq and towards Iran.

There are two key elements to the film’s presentation. One is visual; the other, aural. Much of the film is on the road, the couple taking turns driving their Hummer, the camera simulating their sight through endless anonymous trails. Sex breaks the monotony as the two take to the rocks in their unconscious hommage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). The road trip is correlative to the myth that one can get lost in America; the camera records this subjectively. But it is an objective camera that “finds” the pair when they are copulating or, simply, resting naked on a rock. It is this use of the camera that exposes their vulnerability and prepares us for what will happen to them at the end.

This visual aspect of the film is counterpointed with the couple’s audible breathing, which also encapsulates their vulnerability by reminding us of their reality, their humanity.

Indeed, many shots, such as those of the couple making love in the outdoor motel pool as traffic noisily whizzes by up above, bring into concert the elements of their seclusion—their being as “lost” as they want to be—and their being poised for discovery and being intruded upon. At the end, David and Katia’s secret world collides with the secret world of the roving rapists and killers. This brings to mind Lulu’s crossing paths with Jack the Ripper in Pandora’s Box (1928), although what resonates with the irony of fate in Georg W. Pabst’s film resonates here, in Dumont’s film, with his sense of a particular place—America as a mythic domain out of which one can be plucked at any moment for a brutal dose of American reality.

Dumont has said that he employed the techniques of the modern American horror film to achieve what he wanted in Twentynine Palms. This is another way of saying that that particular genre is the one that America is currently conforming to most in its practice and behavior. With Bush and Cheney in charge, the U.S. is now like a horror film. It is a place of evil that an outsider like Dumont is quicker to recognize, and, because of America’s influence around the world, one suspects that his vision started at home.