Critic Reviews

It’s only when you’re in the grip of the climax that you realize how richly the filmmaker has painted a landscape that to other eyes might appear so parched.

Despite its title, Bruno Dumont's extraordinary first feature is not about Christ, at least not on any literal level. The Life of Jesus may not be about religion, but like the films of Bresson, it is about redemption.

Making use of locals instead of professional actors lends authenticity to this impressive look at a group of otherwise innocuous teenage lads in a boring northern French town (Bailleul in Flanders), driven to violence by a mixture of boredom, jealousy, macho pride and ingrained racism.

No, this isn't another tale about the son of the Almighty, but a perceptive, naturalistic study of disenchanted French youth, which effectively conveys the tedium and frustration of small-town life.

It is described as about a guy who came back to life, and clearly one of Dumont's aims in The Life of Jesus is to express a spirit of charity for flawed humanity amid the rhythms of ordinary life.

An uncompromising portrait of thwarted emotions and small-town tedium, The Life of Jesus is a luminous and disconcerting feature debut from scripter-helmer Bruno Dumont. Pic’s deliberate pace, as it details the actions of adolescents with stifled inner lives, poses a commercial obstacle in markets unfriendly to leisurely fare, but film holds definite rewards for patient viewers and fest auds.

I wanted to show how the underlying racism of society can transform a banal love story into a tragedy, Mr. Dumont has said. His film, for all its characters' uncommunicativeness, is too flat and unswerving to convey that idea surprisingly. But it does bring haunting power to the bitter, tongue-tied helplessness that sets its tragedy in motion.

Harsh and unsparing, Dumont's all-too-believable film charts with breath taking precision the distance between the unencumbered beauty of moving through space and the agony of inexorably falling to earth.