The > movie Twentynine Palms  (2003) is the third feature-length movie of the remarkable French director-philosopher-visual artist > Bruno Dumont.
Only in France, one is often tempted to think, movie directors can work on a steady development of a wayward oeuvre. Only in France, there seems to exist a movie culture, supported by a large, frequently visiting audience, with a sufficient amount of interest and ability to bear an explicit artistic cinema. This is especially true for the still small (up to now 5 movies), but consistent and distinguishly personal featured body of work of Bruno Dumont. His cynical movies, don't bother to please the public.

So, what is it that makes Dumont's work so fascinating? It is especially his vision and eye for detail concerning human behavior. The environment in all his movies, in which the events take place are all desolate places, like the countryside or like in his movie Twentynine Palms , a desert. These kind of places offer the possibility to portray his protagonists in an isolated situation, disconcerted from disturbing factors, so that he can examine their interaction intensively. The countryside fuctions like a laboratory in which the characters have the space to demonstrate their reactions on each other. The character as an experimental animal; in that sense Dumont's movies are truly experimental. Also in his movie Twentynine Palms, the protagonists have all the space, the area of Twentynine Palms spans 800,000 acres, but even here it seems impossible to escape homo homini lupus est ('man is a wolf to his fellow man'). This park, the location of the film, is an endlessly barren and abandoned mountainous landscape, in which only yuca's flourish, and windmills. A real wilderness, that in Dumont's vision can be interpreted as a correlate of the wasteland in human relationships.

Film affiche for the > movie ' Twentynine Palms`

Katja Golubeva and David Wissak

The fact, that the characters bare the same name as the actors themselves -- David (David Wissak, an unknown actor, at that time he only had a credit as a voice actor in a Disney animation) and Katja (Katja Golubeva, known as an actress in the movies of the Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas) -- is indicative for the wafer-thin fictitious layer. Besides this they (as actors!) have a different mother tongue and have to comunicate through pidgins, broken French and English. Consequently, the actors, like their characters have little in common.

As the story (rather a series of non-linear events) of the movie unfolds, the beholder learns near to nothing about the characters. They don't tell each other stories, don't dish up memories and don't fantasize about the future. They live in the here and now. In the rather explicit sex scenes it's like you're watching a nature documentary, this is not love-making, but pairing.

The events in the movie Twentynine Palms are not easy linked together. They travel in a SUV, stay in a motel, and explore locations to photograph. 
It's only in retrospect that certain elements seem to have a different context and pattern. For example, when they arrive at a motel in Twentynine palms they relax in a swimming pool, in the background police sirenes can be heard. Later when they are walking in the village, a motorist shouts a curse at them, adding that it is his street. Therefore every following car becomes a possible threat, but it is only after the gruelling final part of the movie that all these small incidents seem to have a different meaning.

"I am interested in the shock", Dumont explained in an interview after the premiere of his movie Twentynine Palms. "...In generating a primary reaction with the public. And because you have to show the visible to bring about the invisible, I show horrible things. I show people the opposite of what they want or expect to see. This contrast forms the power of cinema: movies have to show evil to accomplish that people will do good".