LIFE OF JESUS (61)

Directed by: Bruno Dumont

Starring: David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel, Kader Chaatouf

The Pitch: Teenage boredom and resentment in a small French town culminate in a racist hate-crime.

Theo Sez: Not as funny as LIFE OF BRIAN ; nor, however, as po-faced as everybody seems to think, either. There's undeniably a sense of humour in a film where a mother shakes her head sadly at TV pictures of a Third World massacre then looks out the window and shakes her head, wearing the exact same expression, at her clumsy teenage son tumbling off his moped ; and one suspects the hero is a bit of an elaborate joke too, a charisma-free zone so complete it can only be deliberate (Provincial Dullness personified), just as the endless shots of him and his buddies motoring aimlessly through their no-hope town or sitting around killing time, watching the occasional car go by ("It's already a quarter to 3," one of them says hopefully), go beyond mere gritty realism to Beckettian absurdity. Dumont loses it a bit when he tries for conventional psychology - the 'sensitive' interlude, where the boys talk about a friend's death, is over-extended, as is their elation when venting their frustrations in music - and it's a bit much how everyone in the gang is stunted and weird-looking (especially when their Arab victim is so classically handsome) ; but he has a knack for putting together little flurries of shots, above all in the redemptive ending, and he's stranger than he seems, tracing little quotation marks around familiar arthouse miserablism. The desolate landscapes are Desolate Landscapes - hyper-real, archetypal, the stuff of parable and passion-play ; note the title.