La vie de Jésus: The Sky Above

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. Yet La vie de Jésus is relentlessly attached to the material, delivering a physical experience rare for a film that eschews handheld camera work and in-your-face proximity to its subjects. There is the collision of bodies when Freddy and Marie have sex, more a struggle than an embrace, but also the way Dumont will send a jolt through the lethargy of provincial life by abruptly cutting to the motion of a roaring motorbike or a car dashing through the surf. Never is it clearer that Freddy is first and foremost a body bound to the earth than when he falls off his motorcycle or hurls himself into a field. His only escape from the here and now comes when he has an epileptic seizure. Freddy hates that loss of control, but Dumont suggests the element of transcendence in what was once known as the sacred disease by lifting the camera away from Freddy’s convulsing body and into the sky. 

Looking back with a knowledge of Dumont’s subsequent films, one is struck by the fact that La vie de Jésus is that rare debut that introduces a filmmaker practically fully formed, a mature artist who came to his first feature having developed a method and identified his themes. Though Dumont’s approach would become more radical with his second feature, L’humanité (1999), and shed the elements of naturalism one still sees in La vie de Jésus, this first feature introduces a director ready to stake a claim to the territory that would be his in the decades to follow. That territory is first a literal one: with the exception of forays to the Mojave Desert in Twentynine Palms (2003), to Paris and Beirut in Hadewijch, and to the south of France in Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), he has been remarkably faithful to Flanders. His films are as closely associated with this once-booming industrial region of attached brick houses, gently rolling farmland, and dunes running into steel-gray waters as John Ford’s movies are with Monument Valley. Yet it is unlikely that the local chamber of commerce was best pleased by Dumont’s representation of his hometown of Bailleul: while there is a raw, unfussy beauty to his views of the surrounding countryside, the town itself is seen as a desolate environment where long streets formed by unbroken rows of squat stone houses funnel into a narrow horizon. 

History weighs heavily in Bailleul: La vie de Jésus’s most festive gathering — as well as the occasion for its first racist outburst — is a commemoration of the Armistice of November 11, 1918, which ended World War I, a conflict that practically leveled Bailleul. Dumont does little to underline the violence that has been visited upon this region, but it is there, a part of the landscape quietly echoing the carnage in Rwanda glimpsed on television in the film’s first minutes. The roofless steeple where Marie and Kader embrace is in fact a monument to the war dead. While both young people note that it stinks of urine, it is here that Kader will be moved to look up to the sky in gratitude, disbelief, or unadulterated joy when Marie rests her head on his shoulder and asks for his forgiveness. In Dumont’s world, everything is contiguous: beauty and ugliness, love and death, the sacred and the profane. We don’t know what Kader feels as he raises his eyes to the sky and sees a cloud absorb the sun’s glorious light, but it is the first time one of the characters in La vie de Jésus lifts his gaze to anything other than the television set mounted high on the wall in the café run by Freddy’s mother. 

While Kader is looking up at a luminous cloud, Freddy is being eased into the dark shaft of an MRI scanner. He sees nothing. Freddy’s enlightenment will not come without tragedy, but he will experience an unknowing communion with Kader. After he is arrested for killing Kader and escapes from the police station, Freddy throws himself into a field and looks up at the sky. Dumont places the camera above Freddy, but not to look down in judgment. Instead, the high angle creates a physical impression of Freddy’s vulnerability. Shirtless and blinded by the sun, he is dwarfed by the tall grass. The sunlight seems to crush him, to push him back into the earth. Then the light changes, and Dumont cuts to an image of the sky much like the one Kader saw, with clouds pulsing in the light of the obscured sun. Through this most surprising of parallels, Freddy sees what Kader saw, though of course he will never know that. In fact, it is the only instance in the film when the viewer knows more than the character on-screen. Dumont trusts us to make sense of this challenging equivalence between the murderer and his victim. 

Some would interpret such a moment as one of religious revelation; others, as a realization of the awe-inspiring power of nature. As we have seen, Freddy is resistant to both religious sentiment and any sensitivity to natural beauty. He hushes Quinquin when he mentions the resurrection of Lazarus and is equally dismissive when his mother suggests that his late father is watching over him. When he and Marie take a chairlift that overlooks the rolling hills outside Bailleul — the closest anyone gets to elevation in this tale of the low countries — he is quick to deflect her admiration of the vista with a lame joke. And so the final moment of La vie de Jésus may be devoted simply to Freddy’s recognition of his smallness in the face of the fundamental vastness of the sky, of the vulnerability that shapes his humanity. Cutting from the shot of the clouds, Dumont shows us an ant, a creature so easily snuffed out, darting over Freddy’s arm. Freddy lets the ant disappear into the grass, and we hear him begin to cry.