Twentynine Palms: (2003. dir: Bruno Dumont) When you read the member reviews on Netflix, you find reactions ranging from disdainful annoyance to sputtering fury. My favorite is by a fellow who is fiercely insulted by a scene in which the characters walk up to a Dairy Queen, order ice cream, and, without asking what flavor they want, the girl brings them soft-serve vanilla cones, which they eat, then they walk away without paying. This man sputters: how could this condescending French director be so uneducated in American ways to think such a thing possible? To which I reply: you watched this movie, and THAT'S what you come away offended by?
Good God, there's so much. How about the vaguely disturbing scene in which David (there are only two characters, really, David and Katya, lovers and fighters: they have sex and they fight, have sex and fight, living in a sort of heremetically sealed cocoon of mutual rage and eroticism while the outside world rarely bumps up against them) is casually masturbating while he watches a Jerry Springer show in which a man is publicly confessing to his wife that he raped their daughter? In my world, that rates higher on the offensive scale than soft-serve vanilla. And, alright, once you've seen the ending, how can you focus your horror on anything else?
If you can watch it without knowing the end, you should. Here is the basic plot: two lovers on a road-trip. Ostensibly, David is scouting locations for a film amongst the Joshua Trees, but we never actually see him taking any notes or photographs or even paying much attention to maps. It seems a much more existential outing than that. Good enough: two lovers in the desert. Sort of Zabriskie Point or the Passenger, or Valley Obscured by Clouds. There is fucking and fighting, back and forth, so realistically drawn that you can't really look away. (Who among us has not had or witnessed that first fight, which begins with one person asking, "What are you thinking?" and the other replying, "Nothing"?) The lineaments of passion, with its darker reaches into the realms of mutual loathing, are continually and tirelessly explored by Dumont. It might get boring except that one has a creeping sense that something awful is bound to happen.
When it does come, it seems brutally random until you realize that actually Dumont has given us a very thorough build-up to his schrecklich climax. From the outset, every exchange with the outside world, even the most glancing, even just ordering food, winds up with some vague threat towards the couple. At a Chinese restaurant, the waitress is angry because they order so little. At the Dairy Queen, there is a marine in uniform hunched with whispered menace over his table. They discuss him, fight about him, and go back to their roadside motel to have sex. Crossing a street, they are furiously berated by a man screaming from the passenger side of a car for their jaywalking. When they stop outside a lonely house in the desert to befriend the dogs, the very stillness of the house feels portentous; you keep thinking get moving! get moving! get back in your car. On the one occasion when Katya is fed up and leaves on foot, she ducks behind a parked truck, inexplicably terrified, every time a car passes.
Don't watch it if you're feeling sensitive. Don't force it on friends or lovers. It's a trial by fire, this movie, one that I found worth the effort (in spite of its Frenchness, a thing which usually leaves me growling), but it does leave terrible images behind it, grafted onto your brain.
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