“Let’s sing and dance, we are free and released! Soon on this island, Paradise will come” -Akata Sun Dunchi (traditional Japanese folk song)

Nestled deep within the human brain lies a pair of small, almond-shaped structures that bear the Greek name for their doppelgänger: amygdala. About the size of a fingernail, the amygdala is assumed to have its origins in the brains of prehistoric fish and it remains today bearing much of the same load as it did millions of years ago. Located in the “primitive” portions of the mind which handle the heavy lifting of basic bodily functions, and immediately adjacent to pleasure central of the hypothalamus, the amygdala has its paws on a range of functions, but this small mass of grey matter is most famous as the center of residual instinctual survival responses of the unpleasant sort—fear, anger, aggression. Thank your amygdala the next time it prompts your brain to remove your hand from the water that’s scalding it—your frontal lobe was busy daydreaming. You can also thank it for then making you mad at the water. French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s third feature Twentynine Palms is a masterpiece of amygdalic cinema—its greatness is felt physically before it’s known consciously—and your first instinct will most likely be to shun the work completely for the conflicted, conflicting responses it inspires. It’s the kind of film which hyperbole was invented for, but even at either end of the spectrum words won’t ever do it justice.

Twentynine Palms speaks directly to portions of the brain (like the amygdala) comfortably left unremembered—inexorable evolution has been working for millennia to bury these necessary pieces under greater and greater complexity, only to pull the neat trick of having that very complexity lead us right to realizations of just how little separates us from our past. Dumont’s decidedly lower-brain, sand-blasted vision of America spends the bulk of its 115 minutes slowly inserting itself between vertebrae on your neck, snaking its way up the brain stem to lie in wait for the most vicious assault on your senses in recent cinematic memory. What precedes the ending offers little for our “complex” white matter to chew on: a town, the desert, two people, sex, eating ice cream, driving, fighting. A clinical look at the visceral of the everyday, Twentynine Palms would be completely aimless, if all of its cascading non-events weren’t fully focused on prophesizing the violence of the finale from its very first frame. Even after Palms has ended, your conscious brain will be reeling to catch up, to process. Thinking about the experience of Twentynine Palms immediately afterwards is probably the last thing you’ll want to do, but let me ask this: do you remember at any point that unnerving sensation of the hair on your arms or neck starting to raise? Feel an uncomfortable chill, even though Dumont presents his audience with image after image of scorched earth? Like any good surgeon (or ex-philosophy professor, as it so happens), Dumont knows how and where to cut for maximum effect.

Twentynine Palms, for all the appearance of art-flab, is a completely calculated, horrific vision—it performs its work without viewers even reaching conscious awareness of what their minds will intuit from the clues he’s dropping all along. In this work of pre-conscious filmmaking, what transpires at the close is merely to drive the point home. A “thriller” Dumont has dubbed it, and a thriller it is, but more in the vein of films like The Son and In the Cut than any recent Ashley Judd vehicle. These films refashion the building blocks of the genre through the prism of highly individualized perspectives, and Dumont’s version offers its audience the fewest concessions, and focuses on the thriller’s bleakest undercurrents. Dumont’s probing, incisive, if not wholly insightful, view of America (in which Jerry Springer is trotted out as a television signpost pointing back towards our culture) and American genre is that of the outsider—keep it in mind for contrast to the weary, lived-in Americana of Vincent Gallo’s un-thriller (yet no less thrilling) The Brown Bunny. Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point has been brought up as a point of reference, but aside from the obvious conditions of production and narrative they share, (European director ventures to the American Southwest to film a couple exploring the desert, themselves) there’s not much else to tie the two of them together—Dumont stays resolutely focused on the physicality of his characters and the physicality of his genre where Antonioni ends up exploding in every direction at once. Dumont separates his project early on, and almost tips his hand—a languorous tracking shot over a crime scene (we presume) lit by recurring flash bulbs assisted by the glare of reddish neons reveals itself, in reverse shot, to be “Je pense…un art film” viewed on television by Los Angeles hipster photographer David (David Wissak) from the bed of his seedy motel room. “It’s amazing,” he indifferently observes. His European girlfriend, Katia (Katia Golubeva) speaks to him from the bathroom. It’s a humorous moment of slight self-parody mixed with a whiff of the commonplace—the kind of scene that gets sprinkled liberally throughout Act Ones across Hollywood. All seems to be well with the pair. What makes Twentynine Palms great is that even at this point in the film, some small part of you will know that everything has already gone wrong.

Recent studies of differences in sexual arousal between the genders have shown that the amygdala may be more instrumental here than previously thought, placing human sexuality and human violence on a close continuum in prehistoric part of the mind suggesting an essential, primeval connection between the two—a hypothesis notable for the complete, irrevocable, and uncomfortable logic it satisfies (consider this in light the climax). Dumont’s realized this all along—in his films sex has always been violence. Think back to Freddie and Marie in his first feature, Life of Jesus, where their intercourse was little more than something done, and violently, as a means to pass time. In Twentynine Palms, David’s intense, screaming orgasms, and Katia’s quiet compliance may provoke an uncomfortable chuckle, but (once again) seem all too necessary in light of where the films finishes. In the Hollywood thriller, sex often forms the necessary precondition for some later act of violence. “Do we have sex to conceal loneliness?” is often asked in “art” films. But Dumont’s query is more like: “Do we have sex because we’re little more than glorified animals?” And then further “how do I get at this?” In this radical refashioning of genre, Twentynine Palms manages to question nothing less than our own pretensions of evolutionary advance.

In truth, it’s difficult to recommend a film like Twentynine Palms knowing the effects it produced in me. Writing about it without throwing up “spoiler” announcements willy-nilly has left my writings on it something of a tease—caught between attempting to convince the uninitiated to take the leap of faith and hoping to convert those who have seen and don’t believe. Honestly, it’s not work to be enjoyed so much as endured, but careful consideration reaps boundless rewards. Twentynine Palms may seem a malicious attempt of cinematic vandalism, and it’s not pleasant, at least not at first. Let the dust settle, the shock wear off, and the lines quoted at the beginning of this piece, from the film’s repeated single-song soundtrack, will seem a statement of purpose. By making a film that doesn’t give an inch to its audience, Dumont has perhaps made the most generous cinematic gesture of his career. You’ll depart the theatre wholly shaken, but completely free as well. The only thing keeping me from rushing to see Twentynine Palms again is my complete fear of doing just that.
—JEFF REICHERT