The Cinematheque

“It’s a measure of Dumont’s strong, classical filmmaking that La vie de Jésus can stand with [the films of] Bresson and Buñuel.”

J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Bruno Dumont’s still-staggering debut is purportedly a continuation of the director’s latest curveball The Empire, a spacefaring Star Wars lampoon sharing few discernible traits with this aesthetically incongruous, retroactive ​“sequel.” Hardly the religious biopic promised by its title, La vie de Jésus is instead a dispassionate, austerely beautiful portrait of unemployed, uneducated, and unsympathetic youth in a small northern French town. Mixing widescreen vistas with intimate extreme close-ups, featuring a uniformly excellent cast of nonprofessionals, and very much bearing the influence of Robert Bresson, the film centres on Freddy, an epileptic 20-year old whose penchant for violence, The Empire dares us to consider, is the product of cosmically preordained evil. Dumont’s connect-the-dots maneuver is perhaps not so outlandish for a film allegedly—ironically—about the life of our lord and saviour. (Freddy, already far from messianic, is now the literal Antichrist!) Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, as well as France’s Prix Jean Vigo.

In French with English subtitles

“One of the great debut features of the last 25 years.”

Clayton Dillard, Slant Magazine

“Uncompromising … A luminous and disconcerting feature debut.”

Lisa Nesselson, Variety