Twentynine Palms (2004)

Simply Perfect

Lack of good storyline.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Opening scene: cars, oil, movement. Main characters: an American called David and a Russian woman called Katia. They're allies, but don't speak the same language, he speaking limited Russian, she limited English.They drive a gas-guzzling military vehicle through the desert. It's a "hummer", typically associated with the Gulf War and the US invasion of Panama (both wars to depose US puppets). Elsewhere, American military bases and soldiers dot the landscape. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, we recall, is situated at Twentynine Palms. Like director Bruno Dumont's later film, "Flanders", "Palms" uses a power struggle between a couple as a springboard for examining US militaristic and political power.Second scene: wind-farms, renewable energy. Our heroes squat and urinate beneath windmills whilst gazing out at automobiles. Having given green energy the middle finger, they continue on their journey. They're a preliminary force, scouting locations. But what comes after them? They drive. While she is largely silent, passive, he leads most of their conversations. Though international dialogue is dominated by one voice, she manages to shape his lingo. Her voice irks him. He puts up with it.He teaches her to drive his vehicle. She can't. She's useless. Still, she teases him. Mocks his ridiculously large vehicle and his irrational love for the machine. He doesn't like being belittled. Minutes later, during an outdoor sex act, he forces her to submit."Love scenes" are peppered throughout the film. The first takes place in a pool, the second in a dry desert, the third again in a pool. He becomes more abusive as their relationship progresses, almost drowning her during their third sex act. He watches a television programme; on screen a father is accused of abusing his daughter. Katia is disgusted. David doesn't care. What's wrong with power?The fourth sex act takes place in a bed. She forces him into submission now, wrestling an orgasm from him. From here on they put aside sex in favour for psychological and physical attacks on one another. She can no longer tolerate him. He becomes the death drive rendered pure. He wants everything at the cost of himself; to consume her whole.Final act: he injures a black dog with his ridiculously large vehicle. His masculine/military prowess is revealed to have repercussions, but so what? To him, it's just a dog. Meanwhile the natives, the symbolic Other, whom he condescending views as "dogs", fight back. Is this an act of justice, vengeance or just more macho posturing? Regardless, he's raped by a gang of locals and swiftly castrated. She wants to tell the police, but he can't bare the shame. He kills her, temporarily reasserting himself, before shamefully committing suicide out in the desert. Final sequences parody or re-contextualise John Ford's desert mountains, the motels of Hitchcock and Hollywood's vision of violence, good, evil, cowboys and Western masculinity. The film positions itself as a European critique of Western Hegemony and male ego, but its audience is baffled. It's too esoteric to do damage - a New French Extremist amalgamation of "The Shining", "Funny Games" and "Bigger Than Life". Credits roll. Required targets left confused, misreading film as existential travelogue or art house horror movie.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Afterschool".

Just finished this.....movie? I'm not sure what else to call it. It's 2 hours of watching 2 people, fight, drive, eat, f**k, swim, fight, f**k, drive, eat, pee, f**k, and ON and ON and ON!!!!!!! Eventually, they are raped and killed. All this happens in the mystical beauty of the American Southwestern Desert. So, was it good? I have no idea. Was it art? Sure, why not. One thing I will say is that every time I wanted to shut this film off, I didn't, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because the lead actress was smoking hot and couldn't seem to keep her clothes on for more than 15 minutes. Maybe it was because I really wanted to see the main guy if this film get hit by a bus. Why does every guy in this movie scream when they have an orgasm like somebody just dumped boiling water on their genitals? Ugh?!?! Would I watch it again? Probably not. 29 Palms will undoubtedly haunt my mind for a few days. If this is what the director was going for, then bravo. I've also received the same effect after seeing a 300 pound women in a bikini. That incident didn't take 2 hours of my life away. For what its worth, the two lead actors did a damn good job acting like a dysfunctional couple on a road trip. I've been there, only nobody raped or killed me because of it.

It's not even enough to blame this on warped French sensibilities. There is no movie here - no plot, no story, no theme, no characters, no cinematography, no soundtrack - just boring shots of the desert inter cut with boring shots of awkward sex - until you finally and mercifully get an ending that is apparently from a different movie entirely. I think it must be a perverse joke by the director - some kind of statement on the absolute banality of our lives if we are willing to sit through something like this - and the fact that the best we can hope for is a violent end to our empty existence. The director should never be allowed to touch a camera again in his life.

This is a film about a young couple, possibly at an early stage in their relationship, who are out in the desert somewhere in California in a humvee. The young man David is scouting for locations to photograph but doesn't seem to get up to much work, Katia his girlfriend is a francophone. They communicate fairly well through a mixture of pidgin French and English from David, but it adds a little distance maybe. It's a harsh kind of a film that makes you feel uneasy from the start. The relationship is very volatile and the desert locations unrelenting. It ends in horror. One warning to anyone who sees the movie is that it is very sexually explicit.I hadn't realised that Dumont had an interest in image, this film is full of the most awesome experimental image work. There was this scene at the start where the Hummer is taking on petrol at the gas station and there's the tiniest frame made from where the road embankment in the background starts at the bottom to the top of the open car door frame at the top, a sliver where cars dash past, but they're also dashing into their own reflection in the side windows of the car, and all this is brutally at about head level. I wondered if this might have been accidental brilliance, so casually did the movie appear to have been made. However very shortly afterwards I was really sitting up because there's another masterpiece of composition where a train with white containers passes in front of this windfarm and you only get to see the windmills in the gaps between the slowly moving containers. It's one of the most beautiful shots I've ever seen in a movie. Again in the pool at the hotel, you can see a guy who wants to work the camera, the shot is really only a couple of inches above the lapping water and you see this image of David, strongly distorted by the water that's pretty cool.There are some very primal love scenes shot in what I refer to as the sea of stone, the pair of lovers apricating naked on a gigantic rock resting their heads on the other's boot, reminiscent of Zabriskie Point to me. The ending of the movie is so brutal, and even to me unexpected, because I hadn't read anything about the film. I feel almost like crying about it now.It's a film about the distance even between the minds of two lovers, and the incipient brutality of an alienated society. A total masterpiece.