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Genre: Drama
Director: Bruno Dumont
Starring: David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre
Language: French
Duration: 110 min.
Summary:
Beside the English Channel, along the Côte d'Opale, near a hamlet, with
its dunes and marshes, lives a mysterious wanderer from nowhere who
struggles along, poaches, prays and builds fires.
Outside Satan is a film written and directed by Bruno Dumont. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Dumont, who is one of my favorite active filmmakers, returns to his beloved Nord-Pas-de-Calais—the region where he grew up, and the picturesque setting of most of his previous films—to deliver an entirely mysterious and hypnotic effort that follows a quiet nameless wanderer played by David Dewaele. A Christ-like figure who possesses unexplained powers, he lives off the land and the charity of local residents.
As expected, and a warning to anyone not familiar with Dumont, this is a deliberately slow and pensive film with very limited dialogue. Much of it's running time is devoted to scenes of nothing but The guy and she (Alexandra Lemâtre)—none of the characters are given names and are listed in the credits with generic titles like 'The guy', 'she', and 'the guard'—casually walking across the landscape, or staring blankly off into the distance.
Long time Dumont cinematographer Yves Cape, who is by now a master of capturing the immeasurable natural beauty of the vast hills, valleys, and windswept coasts of this setting, does so with a steady and often distant, wide-lens. There is a thoughtful manner in which the shots are framed, sometimes close up on the unemotive faces of the characters, and sometimes from a long and wide vantage that allows them to become slowly moving specks in the background.
He also uses sound to great effect, directly recording the ever present wind, bird chirps, and natural din with an immersive clarity. The sound always closely follows the characters, capturing every hushed breath and footstep, even as the camera lingers behind. It's a wonderful effect that spares us from the shaky hand-held camerawork that normally accompanies such intimate audio.
The story itself is ambiguously mystical and spiritual, and true to the director's form, the action is at times shockingly explicit and highly disturbing. Dewaele's character is not exactly the typical picture of Satan either. He is a strange and intriguing figure, capable of extraordinary deeds, and from the side of the story we are shown, it would seem mostly good ones.
Overall a genuinely powerful and unflinching picture, it fits well as a companion to the director's previous film Hadewijch, one that explores evil acts done in the name of God. Though, I think one's enjoyment of Outside Satan will depend a lot on whether or not you are a fan of Bruno Dumont's distinct style; and if you haven't seen any of his films yet, then this one is as good an introduction as any.
French
director Bruno Dumont has gained a very divided reputation. He has a
preference for dealing with religious subject matter and in ways that
are often controversial. His most famous work is 29 Palms (2003), which
has as many detractors as it does people praising its merits. Other of
Bruno Dumont’s films include The Life of Jesus (1997), Humanity (1999),
Flanders (2006) and Hadjewich (2009).
The reason for Bruno Dumont’s
divided reputation is immediately evident in Outside Satan. It is a film
that is infuriating in its refusal to give us anything for a large part
of its running time. The lead character, who is only ever named Le Gars
(The Guy) – the ruggedly handsome and impossibly well coiffed David
Dewaele – says almost nothing throughout, answering most questions with
impassive silence. We are told nothing about him and everything that we
believe might be the case concerning him is ambiguous. Most of the film
consists of long scenes of David Dewaele, accompanied by Alexandra
Lematre (another of the waifs that French cinema loves where she seems
about as near to the legal age limit as it is possible to get), walking
through fields or up and down dunes and hillocks.
As we soon gather, Outside Satan is another variant on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), which was about the appearance of a miraculous little-speaking Christ-like visitor who turned people’s lives upside down. The same figure turns up in other films such as That Eye, The Sky (1994) and Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q (2001). Or perhaps given the film’s title, the more appropriate figure of analogy might be Sting’s visitor in Brimstone and Treacle (1982). All of these films have the common theme of a mystery figure who appears capable of affecting miracles and changing people’s lives, although is very much a morally ambiguous character who seems to do as much bad as good.
Following suit, David Dewaele seems to be capable of miracles, although we can never entirely be sure whether this is the case. He is begged by a mother (Sonia Barthelemy) to heal her daughter (Juliette Bacquet) who is in a withdrawn state. The Guy sits in a chair by her bedside for a few minutes, doing and saying nothing, then gets up and leaves and she appears better. Later, just like the end of Brimstone and Treacle, he forces himself on her and afterwards she makes a full recovery. Elsewhere, he indicates to Alexandra Lematre that he will help with her stepfather if she follows him and stands inside a fire he has made (something we never see her do). At its most overt, he tells her that if she walks across a narrow ledge that bifurcates a miniature lake he will cause a massive fire that appears to be ravaging the countryside to stop – she makes it and afterwards the fire has vanished or was never there all along. Equally, The Guy also conducts very morally dubious acts – he shoots and kills the stepfather who abuses Alexandra Lematre; beats up and hospitalises the harmless-seeming guard (Christophe Bon) who asks Alexandra out but she has no interest in; and shoots a gun randomly across the fields and is apologetic but not really concerned when he finds he has accidentally killed a deer. At the film’s most disturbing point, there is a scene where he meets a hitchhiking woman (Aurore Broutin) who offers herself to him, he ravages her, which causes her to convulse and froth at the mouth, although afterwards she crawls into a river and appears to emerge refreshed.
[PLOT SPOILERS] The scene that finally takes Outside Satan over into the fantastic is the final one, which takes a leaf or two from Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1955). Here Alexandra Lematre is killed. We initially suspect The Guy of this but later this is revealed not to be the case. The Guy then sneaks into the family home where the body is laid out and steals it wrapped in a sheet. He takes it out into the middle of nowhere and kneels beside it for a time. After he leaves, she comes back to life with a gasp.
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