Bruno Dumont has always favored a spare, brutal simplicity to his films, one likely drawn from Robert Bresson, an ascetic, highly physical approach towards presenting his nonprofessional actors and the squalid messes their characters get themselves into within the expansive environments in which they live. Dumont’s formal minimalism rarely results in simple-minded films, but in Flanders the director has whittled down his content to a particularly inane, reductive fable based on the notion that people are beasts. At home they certainly are: introverted young farmer Demester (Samuel Boidin) impassively sleeps with his childhood friend Barne (Adélaïde Leroux), but says they aren’t dating; Barne sleeps with another young man (Henri Cretel), has a friend who says the community thinks she is a whore, and later weeps when both men are called away to an unspecified desert war. And so they are beasts at war too: far from home, the soldiers rape and kill mostly indiscriminately, letting their emotions take over and drive their actions, as well as taking advantage of the looser social structures of the war environment, violently playing out their inner tensions—pent up frustrations brought from home. Dumont crosscuts this war with Barbe’s struggle back home, where introspection on her local reputation, an unwanted pregnancy, the indifference of her father, and loneliness fray her nerves. Flanders is most beautiful in its innocuous moments of solitude, playing on Dumont’s strength for integrating pensive characters into their desolate environments. The first third of the film is practically a study of the sound solitary footsteps make as characters tromp around their overcast farms biding time until the soldiers have to depart. Later, the squad aspect of soldiering forms a direct contrast to this isolation, as a group of like-minded, violent young men form a kind of mutually supportive atmosphere of bestiality that no one has access to back home, alone on the farm. It seems to be this solipsistic introversion that drives everyone’s bestiality, their focus on themselves and their own desires rather than others’ sorrow, or, more broadly, other’s existence as human beings with just as much feelings as the solitary, homegrown individual. Whenever characters weep, or look inwards, it is always alone.

This is all far from facile, but Dumont structures his film like a caustic, grossly simplified fable, setting out to prove that war is just a continuation of man’s spiritual solipsism and physical beastliness by other means. The war acts as the exterior hell that life on the Flanders’ farmland pushed to the interior. (Barbe’s brief hospitalization in a mental institution highlights this interior/home, exterior/war split.) The lack of real differences between the two places is continually highlighted, although the motif that characters back home in Flanders tend to walk around their farmland in circles (alone) whereas the soldiers plunge outward on an unnamed desert mission (together) is a particularly inspired way of subtly working out the reasons why the degree of physical and sexual violence perpetrated in war is different from that at home, even if the base desires and driving forces are the same. Certainly the questionable relationships drawn by the film are the source of its trite simplification, the way Demester’s literal living out of the dehumanization, immorality, and cruelty of his uninspired desires overseas at war makes him appreciate Barbe all the more when he returns home. And Barbe is even more troublesome, as her place in the story mostly as a passive recipient for male sexual desires aligns with the treatment of the Others (whoever the wartime enemy may be) by the same men at war. But perhaps some of the simplicity of Dumont’s film also comes from his lopsided casting. Usually quite astute in a combination of the Bresson and Dardennes tradition of casting nonprofessional actors for both their plastic qualities as well as their expressive interiority, only Adélaïde Leroux’s performance remains affective as most of the other men are lost in the anonymity of soldiering. Samuel Boidin’s performance, like the film itself, tends towards the overly simplified, which takes much of the openness and ambiguity out of his interiority that is so compelling at the beginning of the film as he wanders his dreary farmland, leans swaying on gate rails, and watches passively as Barbe leaves him for another man. Of course, Leroux does get the most expressive, melodramatic role, befitting her “homefront” side of the narrative, but the ambiguity of her passionless flings, searching looks, and weepy allegiance to two different men is far more compelling and mysterious than Boidin’s impassive lunk who through war finally sees Barbe as something other than someone to stick it in. Flanders starts raising interesting questions about the relationship between the emptiness found in life at home and the motivations that spur one to fight, to kill, rape, and betray, but its gross simplification of the scenario and dubious dialectics and similarities between the women of the homefront and enemies at war reduce and corrupt the power of Dumont’s always evocative and insightful exploration of the relationship between people and their environments.