In
Humanité, directed by Bruno Dumont, an eleven-year-old
girl is brutally raped and killed in Bailleul, a working-class
town in the French province of Nord-Pas-de-Calais near Dunkerque
and the Belgian border. Police superintendent Pharaon De Winter
(played by Emmanuel Schotté), an unattractive man in his thirties,
is assigned to the case and cannot at first imagine how anyone
could commit such a heinous act. Pharaon, according to the
film, lost his wife and child a few years earlier (presumably
in an auto accident in which he was the driver) and lives
with his mother, who is a widow herself. His best friends
are a twenty-three-year-old factory worker Domino (plaved
by Séverine Caneele) and her busdriver boyfriend Joseph (played
by Philippe Tullier). Distressed by the horrible rape, which
activates sad memories of his recent loss of a family, he
turns to Domino for emotional support. When he goes to her
room in the house next door, he views a scene in which Joseph
is having rough intercourse with Domino and then exits. Intuitively,
he associates the rape with the sex scene that he has just
witnessed, but he goes about the task of tracking down the
rapist methodically albeit melancholically. Witnesses provide
little of substance, but the facts all point to Joseph, who
as busdriver was the last person to see the eleven-year-old
alive as she left the bus to return home from school. Pharaon
watches sports on television, tends flowers in a garden, dines
with his mother, takes a trip to the seashore with his two
friends, and donates a painting to an art gallery in Lille
(his grandfather is the famous painter of the same name),
but finds no solace and cannot arrest his friend. Domino crudely
offers sex to assuage Pharaon's sadness, but he wants love,
something that she cannot offer. Publicity about the case
throughout France prompt the authorities in Paris to assign
an investigator from the provincial capital of Lille, and
they are able to solve the crime with dispatch. For Americans
accustomed to action- or dialog-based movies, Humanité is
quite a challenge. The cop does not get his man. The scriptwriter
provides no verbal intellectualization to tell us what new
thoughts he wants us to ponder. Instead, there are many long
walks by Pharaon with nothing said. Dumont's aim is to force
the filmviewer to imagine what the police superintendent must
be thinking so that we can be drawn into the pain and must
come to terms with the way in which the advances of our civilization
have made evil so readily accessible. MH
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