Critics reviews

Like Bresson, Dumont stages shots to highlight their flatness and the base elements of any given action. These visual choices create the sensation that we’re encountering more a tableau of reality than anything approaching documentary realism.

Dumont does not challenge us to embrace religious values, much less sacred rites, but to yearn for something greater than the ersatz reality on television, the cruelty born of boredom, and a stony resistance to beauty.

Confronting basic philosophical questions about existence, humanity, society and morality, the themes considered by Bruno Dumont in La vie de Jésus are not new or original ones by any means. We are however perhaps not accustomed to see these issues confronted in such a provocative manner on the screen... a manner that – as the title suggests – directly challenges conventional Christian notions of humanism.

Essentially it's a work of low key 'realism' in the Bressonian tradition (albeit less obviously 'spiritual'), though it includes odd touches... but that's a very minor criticism when compared to writer/director Dumont's tough, confident handling of mood, milieu, pace, performance and theme.

Dumont cast Life of Jesus with local, nonprofessional actors, and he builds his slow-moving, organically structured film quietly... 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.

"I wanted to show how the underlying racism of society can transform a banal love story into a tragedy," Dumont has also 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.

It’s in the faces of his nonprofessional cast, particularly in the brooding presence of David Douche’s Freddy. It’s in the flatness of the CinemaScope landscape, in the insistent austerity of the sound track, and in the inertia that explodes into violence. The Life of Jesus may not be about religion, but like the films of Bresson, it is about redemption.

Tales of barely contained, inchoate angst usually favor a grittier look than this, but lensing is precise and unlabored, with a straightforward elegance... The entirely non-pro cast, drawn from local residents on location, is touching and convincing throughout.