Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

One of my all time favorites.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Twentynine palms captures the atmosphere of the high desert, I am English and I have been to the area, I found it to be very powerful and raw, the desert isn't something that exists in England and the sense of overwhelming space with no consequence is captured brilliantly in this film.I would describe this as a photographer's film as there is very little camera movement, lots of action takes place in a mundane way in what is essentially a still image, these 'stills' are not especially beautifully composed or crafted but just real, the lack of camera movement and long lingering still shots add a sense of space and the mundane to the film.The plot is inconsequential to the atmosphere and essentially it is the place and setting with the sense of isolation that brings out the primal urges from our main characters weather they be sexual or violent. This is not classical entertainment but a brilliant art house movie, the only improvements for me would have been aesthetic, the movie could have been more crafted and still kept the atmosphere.

Opening scene: cars, oil, movement. Main characters: an American called David and a Russian woman called Katia. They're allies, but don't speak the same language, he speaking limited Russian, she limited English.They drive a gas-guzzling military vehicle through the desert. It's a "hummer", typically associated with the Gulf War and the US invasion of Panama (both wars to depose US puppets). Elsewhere, American military bases and soldiers dot the landscape. The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, we recall, is situated at Twentynine Palms. Like director Bruno Dumont's later film, "Flanders", "Palms" uses a power struggle between a couple as a springboard for examining US militaristic and political power.Second scene: wind-farms, renewable energy. Our heroes squat and urinate beneath windmills whilst gazing out at automobiles. Having given green energy the middle finger, they continue on their journey. They're a preliminary force, scouting locations. But what comes after them? They drive. While she is largely silent, passive, he leads most of their conversations. Though international dialogue is dominated by one voice, she manages to shape his lingo. Her voice irks him. He puts up with it.He teaches her to drive his vehicle. She can't. She's useless. Still, she teases him. Mocks his ridiculously large vehicle and his irrational love for the machine. He doesn't like being belittled. Minutes later, during an outdoor sex act, he forces her to submit."Love scenes" are peppered throughout the film. The first takes place in a pool, the second in a dry desert, the third again in a pool. He becomes more abusive as their relationship progresses, almost drowning her during their third sex act. He watches a television programme; on screen a father is accused of abusing his daughter. Katia is disgusted. David doesn't care. What's wrong with power?The fourth sex act takes place in a bed. She forces him into submission now, wrestling an orgasm from him. From here on they put aside sex in favour for psychological and physical attacks on one another. She can no longer tolerate him. He becomes the death drive rendered pure. He wants everything at the cost of himself; to consume her whole.Final act: he injures a black dog with his ridiculously large vehicle. His masculine/military prowess is revealed to have repercussions, but so what? To him, it's just a dog. Meanwhile the natives, the symbolic Other, whom he condescending views as "dogs", fight back. Is this an act of justice, vengeance or just more macho posturing? Regardless, he's raped by a gang of locals and swiftly castrated. She wants to tell the police, but he can't bare the shame. He kills her, temporarily reasserting himself, before shamefully committing suicide out in the desert. Final sequences parody or re-contextualise John Ford's desert mountains, the motels of Hitchcock and Hollywood's vision of violence, good, evil, cowboys and Western masculinity. The film positions itself as a European critique of Western Hegemony and male ego, but its audience is baffled. It's too esoteric to do damage - a New French Extremist amalgamation of "The Shining", "Funny Games" and "Bigger Than Life". Credits roll. Required targets left confused, misreading film as existential travelogue or art house horror movie.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Afterschool".

This is one of those films where "nothing happens", where the frame stands as a window into the world of tedium. It's contrasted against this humming nothingness, mirrored in the film in the empty stretches of desert, that the small gestures can reverberate outwards to the eternal, to give us a portrait of life as we might know it by our own existence, elsewhere, in some other time.These fleeting human moments, painful or exhilarating in their small profundity, largely make the film for me. A man stealing a glance at a passing girl in a diner, glance which may or may not be casual or mean something else, and which makes the woman sulk in jealous consternation. The woman trying to penetrate the hard, unyielding, demeanor of the man, asking him as he drives what is he thinking, the man saying nothing. The irritable tantrum of the man when their car won't go any further in a dirt road, that reveals the male child inside, petulant and impotent at the sight of failure.Elsewhere Dumont fails to cut as incisively. The contrast he gives us in the first pool scene, "do you love me?", "do you like my penis?", is simpleminded at best.The film works despite all that, first as a tangible reminder of the meaninglessnes of craving, here in the form of carnal animal sex that needs to be consumated, almost exorcised, the moment it builds. The nothingness of Dumont's desert world is not the shunyata of the Buddhists though, a realization of the world in true form. Rather it's a limbo where souls in disconnect aimlessly drag their feet yearning for a sense of direction or purpose when the only sense possible is a sense of still time. This shines for me in the latenight scene where David finds Katia sitting by herself at the side of the macadam, they seem like they're washed ashore in some other plain of existence. A pall of simmering, unspeakable, violence hangs over this like the shifting rents of dust in a dirt road, so that at least a breaking point can be surmised to be waiting at the other end.Then it works for me as a painful vehicle that brings us at the brink of the existential void. I'm not very enamored of the act of random cruelty that makes this possible, the randomness makes sense yet at the same time it's so easy as to be schematic, but the monster that emerges on the other end is a shocking sight to me because I have the memory of the flawed human being that used to be.The dysfunction of the protagonists then, foremostly human, also foreshadows doom. That malaise we see but small traces of in their behavior must exist out there too, in the rest of the world that is largely kept from our eyes.Dumont doesn't dare go any further than this, that is if we accept there is somewhere to go, but as an agnostic lament it goes far enough.

While working in the California desert, French auteur Bruno Dumont (Flanders, Humanite, The Life Of Jesus) "suddenly became afraid." Thus blossomed Twentynine Palms, a mesmerizing, allegorical, terrifyingly unclassifiable foray into the Mojave and the problematic center of Yeats' The Second Coming. Ostensibly, Palms is the story of an American photographer, David (David Wissak) and his European girlfriend, Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva of Leos Carax's Pola X) on assignment in the Joshua Tree desert. Hobbled by a Babelish communication barrier, their interaction limited to sex, and a mutual, rapidly disintegrating co-dependence, the couple is moving deeper into no-man's land on some kind of aimless and encroachingly sinister vision quest. An exquisite road picture interspersed with long pockets of drifting, expansive dreaminess, Palms has moments of serenity and meditative calm. But make no mistake: it's moving closer to something awful in every frame, its sense of what's approaching disarmed rather than exacerbated by the landscape…the opposite strategy of pictures like Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock, another brilliant nature film in which the natural world becomes oppressive and claustrophobic despite the freedom of sky and open spaces. The film benefits enormously from the perfect physical appearance of its leads: Wissak has alarming eyes and a face that seems to have disaster imprinted into it...one of the most brilliant achievements of the film is the way the faces of both leads keep fluctuating from dead to alive, without any noticeable outward changes in makeup or lighting.The concept of Palms as a love story, as some have called it, falls hard. The film is loaded with sex…intense, wailing, despairing sex that foreshadows in every way the horror that is to come at movie's end, though exactly what kind of a statement Dumont was trying to make with this remains unclear; one is inevitably moved to question his motives in the same way many questioned Gaspar Noe's in Irreversible (a film to which Palms has been infrequently compared). But Dumont's superb sense of artistry and restraint has noting is common with Noe's adolescent appropriation of philosophies too sophisticated for him and his fascination with cruelty and sadism cloaked in frantic & flashy concept art. Instead, Twentynine Palms presents us with the problem of evil accompanied by a sense of profound and deep sorrow, a mourning for a fate that may or may not be implied as inexorable, playing out under the unchanging beauty of land and sky.