An odd, slow, disturbing near-masterpiece set in Bailleul, in the north of France, where a sad-sack policeman named Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté) investigates a sordid crime-the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. The dim but empathic Pharaon lives with his mother and longs for Domino (Séverine Caneele), the big-boned factory worker and commonplace sex goddess who lives down the street. In form, the movie is a detective story, but we watch with increasing apprehensiveness as it dawns on us that Pharaon might be a kind of sluggish Oedipus, a sleuth who uncovers the traces of a crime that he has committed himself. Or did he commit it? The director, Bruno Dumont, works in Cinemascope, and the enormous, sharply focussed images breathe air and light and a richly suggestive stillness, a palpable sense of something powerful beneath the skin. The candor of the sexual imagery hints at a hidden connection between sex and violence, though we may find it hard in the end to say what that connection is-the movie’s final shots are outrageously cryptic.
Séverine Caneele nude.
