Films of the New French Extremity by Alexandra West

Author:Alexandra West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

Quandt—and many other critics—could not get past the violent final act. To many it seems to be an extreme and unnecessary jump scare, which has no place in Dumont’s film or, indeed, his already beloved oeuvre. In Twentynine Palms, David and Katia venture out into the Wild West on a road trip. Already pulling from several tropes that cast a long shadow in mainstream cinema, Dumont is determined to examine the effects of these situations on two seemingly normal people. Film scholar Martine Beugnet has written of how Dumont’s filmmaking pushes the banality, and the banality of horror, to its limits,6 and in Twentynine Palms there is nary an aspect of David and Katia’s relationship that is not lingeringly examined. The entire film, especially the final moments, is devoid of cinematic trickery or coercion; they are events, sometimes artistically, unfolding in front of an audience.

David’s issues with anger and ambivalence are some of the few moments that mark Twentynine Palms with more traditional dramatic tension. In a truly upsetting scene, David and Katia sit on their motel bed watching The Jerry Springer Show, where a father admits to sexually abusing his daughter.

“Poor thing,” mummers Katia.

“Who?” replies David.

The chilling coldness of the scene mars the rest of their relationship, creating an uneasy tension between David, Katia, and the viewer. In another scene David allows Katia to drive his Hummer which she accidentally scratches. When David nearly convulses with rage, eliciting laughter from Katia which dehumanizes and alienates him, the audience is once again privy to an unnerving side of David, one that can flare up at a moment’s notice. David’s flashes of rage and unsympathetic outlook overshadows their relationship. He is protective of his belongings, one of which, he believes, is Katia. At another point the couple passes a uniformed military man with a shaved head. David asks Katia if she would like it if he did that; she replies that if he did, she’d leave him. She then admits that she finds the Marines very attractive, which launches David into a fit about their lack of real communication. David’s killing of Katia occurs when he emerges from their bathroom after he has attempted to transform himself by shaving his own head. In a twisted way, David has become the man Katia views as attractive. David’s purging of his hair causes a break in his psychosis, rendering him nearly unrecognizable and a tool for destruction, much like those enlisted in the Army. As Dumont says of David and Katia’s relationship:

Good and evil are polar concepts—one can’t exist without the other. If there was no evil … the couple is in the primordial human condition of sexual bliss, but with this threat of disaster that can spring from any quarter without reason or cause…. It’s about the banality of the couple. About boredom, anticipation, anger, reconciliation. All the so-called trivia, the details of a relationship, I made those the focus. I wanted to reduce the importance of the subject matter and change the figure-ground relationship.

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