IN 'FLANDERS,' WAR IS HELL -- AND SO IS LOVE.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Critic

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, "Flanders" is an affecting slice of French miserabilism.

The latest from controversial director Bruno Dumont ("L'Humanite," "Life of Jesus"), it's more or less a wallow in contemporary peasant degradation, with enough hints of grace to prevent viewers from going home and slitting their wrists.

The director hasn't refined this formula to the sublime visual and narrative degrees such Francophone masters as the late, great Robert Bresson ("Mouchette," "Diary of a Country Priest") and Belgium's Dardenne brothers ("L'Enfant," "Rosetta") have. But Dumont has his own, quite moving way of oppressing people in gorgeously composed landscapes and drawing unmistakable feelings out of amateur, barely articulate performers. His films engulf us in shattering emotion without appearing to even try.

"Flanders" is as simple and sad as it can be. The brutish-looking, soft-souled young farmer Demester (Samuel Boidin) has been called up to war. Barbe (Adelaide Leroux), his neighbor since childhood, sees this as good reason for them to have short, businesslike sex. That night, she goes off with another draftee, Blondel (Henri Cretel), who's passing through their village.

Though hurt, Demester quietly accepts this, and Barbe's concern for both men's safety trumps any questions of preference and jealousy. And when the new soldiers go from Flanders' muddy, fertile fields to the unnamed desert to fight, her worst fears are more than realized.

Dumont intercuts between the small French unit's inevitable descent into barbarism -- they kill children and rape, but are no less cruel than their unforgiving Muslim opponents -- and Barbe, pregnant back at home, trying to cope with several existential crises at once. The closest thing to a character arc involves Demester's shellshocked efforts to retain some shreds of decency, which crystallizes when he has to decide -- and fast -- how to treat his romantic rival in a life-and-death situation.

The people of "Flanders" are besieged on all sides, from the magnified sounds of daily drudgery, the horrors of war and the sheer uncertainty of how to be loved. It's a depressing, uncompromising picture, but one so steeped in an unfussy, recognizable realism that it often becomes a kind of free-verse, cinematic poem.

And that buys it a lot of redemption.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

[e-mail]

FLANDERS - Three stars

(Not rated: violence, nudity, sex, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Samuel Boidin, Adelaide Leroux, Henri Cretel.

Director: Bruno Dumont.

Running time: 1 hr. 28 min.

Playing: Landmark's Nuart, West Los Angeles.

In a nutshell: Grim, primal and moving study of young farm people brutalized by war and life. In French with English subtitles.

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Controversial director Bruno Dumont's "Flanders" is full of human suffering against a backdrop of gorgeously composed landscapes. The film is simple and sad.