Twentynine Palms

Name: Twentynine Palms
Genre: Drama, Thriller

France, Germany, United States · 2003
1h 54m
Director Bruno Dumont
Starring Yekaterina Golubeva, David Wissak
Genre Drama, Thriller

David, an independent photographer, and Katia, an unemployed woman, leave Los Angeles, en route to the southern California desert, where they search a natural set to use as a backdrop for a magazine photo shoot. They find a motel in the town of Twentynine Palms and spend their days in their sport-utility vehicle, discovering the Joshua Tree Desert, and losing themselves on nameless roads and trails. Frantically making love all the time and almost everywhere, they regularly fight, then kiss and make up, with little else going on in their empty relationship and quite ordinary daily life--until something horrible and hideous brutally puts an end to their trip.

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What are critics saying?

The New Yorker by David Denby

The latest minimalist provocation from the infuriating but talented French director Bruno Dumont. [12 April 2004, p. 89]

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

Dumont's methods are radical, but there's a fascinating method to his seeming cinematic madness.

Village Voice by Dennis Lim

The "Humanite" director's Death Valley void is the real "Lost in Translation."

The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck

Ultimately a hollow and pointless exercise.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it's exceptionally ugly and unpleasant.

Variety by Lisa Nesselson

Fails to captivate or intrigue at the most basic level.

Los Angeles Times by Manohla Dargis

Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads.

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness; Dumont even manages to make sex in the desert boring.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

The sustained force of Mr. Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker.

100

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

At turns sexy, ultra-violent and sweet, it will infiltrate your brain long after you've seen it.