The latest minimalist provocation from the infuriating but talented French director Bruno Dumont. [12 April 2004, p. 89]
Twentynine Palms
France, Germany, United States · 2003
1h 54m
Director Bruno Dumont
Starring Yekaterina Golubeva, David Wissak
Genre Drama, Thriller
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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 people saying?
What are critics saying?
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Dumont's methods are radical, but there's a fascinating method to his seeming cinematic madness.
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.
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.
At turns sexy, ultra-violent and sweet, it will infiltrate your brain long after you've seen it.
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