thesiouxfallskid Somewhere here someone mentions that you should see this film knowing hardly anything in advance. I agree. Better no idea, but how can you know you should see this film to begin with? Not a film for a lot of people. So I shall constrain my review so not to spoil it. I do not see any allegory as some apparently have. It tells a simple story. A man and a women stay in a motel in 29 Palms, California, and take drives out in the desert. They are lovers. They speak in both English and French. They make out and have their spats. Much of the film is slow moving. We get a heavy dose of drab reality as life is for so many of us, and what eventually later happens is another heavy dose of reality of something which does happen to a few of us. A film of nothing really beautiful. Drab, petty, slow, and then something happens. In a sense there is a certain meaninglessness throughout the film, but isn't life like that? Not a film for those depressed seeking something with which to feel good. Now there is matter-of-fact graphic nudity, which is the nudity most of us are familiar with more from life than from film. One thing it did for me is that I have resolved to have certain something with me when I go driving out in lonely stretches of desert. Definitely an art-house film, not for most of us, and not for sheer entertainment. More a film for those in a life of escapism who can use a heavy dose of reality.

Zaphod_ Well ,after watching this movie I was shocked by how bad and ridiculous it was. It's simply a dry and dreadful movie without any message nor any interesting plot developments--a very pointless ,pathetic ,and boring movie. And besides ,there weren't any story build nor any much information about the characters and around half the endless time the characters were just naked like a porn and nothing really happened between them not mentioning the awful and unconnected and very DISGUSTING END (man raping a man while some other guys beating his girlfriend....pretty sick and really awful-really hard to watch). This movie had so much basic mistakes and it was predictable and limited without any emotion or any interesting dialogs (the text was lame too...). In conclusion: better to avoid it ,not worth watching -complete waste of time.

LoveAndDeath Here is a summary of what happens in this film:1% - driving through city 85% - driving through beautiful scenery. I love driving through beautiful scenery, which is why I would never watch a movie of it, you really have to be there.5% - sitting in a hotel room grinding through utterly forgettable dialog9% - bodily functions:* Urination* Sex. 3 or 4 scenes (can't remember) and man-on-man rape* Eating0% - plot, storyline, motivation, character development.I love daring movies that defy convention to tell a story. Problem with this movie is there just isn't a story to tell. Since I love to drive through beautiful scenery, I have no particular interest in watching it in a movie. After 20 minutes I started fast- forwarding through the driving, leaving about 20 minutes of film left. Unfortunately that left mostly sex scenes, so I fast-forwarded through them and that left about 5 minutes of film. Maybe.

chaos-rampant 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.