Colonial Life

Freddy loves his mother (Genevieve Cottreel), a kind but passive woman; his girlfriend Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), a rosy cashier at the local supermarket; his pet finch; and the pimply comrades with whom, when he's not receiving treatment for his epilepsy, he spends his days mindlessly speeding round the countryside on motorbikes. Theirs is a barren life: Dumont depicts Bailleul as a forlorn, bedraggled place unglamorized by either the Rockwellian romance of Hollywood schmaltz or the black comedy of neo-noir. It's a ghost town brought low by joblessness, its culture sucked dry by television, its stoical inhabitants drifting around in the padded silence of the hopeless. Dumont shoots his nonprofessional actors in long, static takes that reveal the compulsive repetitions of Freddy's world: his ravenous couplings with Marie; his jerking epileptic fits; above all, his frantic rides through the country lanes with his friends, playing chicken with a mysterious fancy car. When a character moves out of frame, the camera lingers on the lovely landscape as if to emphasize its contrast with the boys' futile lives. More than any facile psychologizing, the desolate tone of The Life of Jesus explains the alienation that moves these boys, who love playing in the town's marching band, to casually rape a pudgy cheerleader and then wonder what all the fuss is about when the town responds with outrage. It's Freddy's dead-end drifting, as much as the lascivious eye that the good-looking - and fully employed - North African boy Kader (Kader Chaatouf) casts on Marie, that brings the white boy's rage and frustration to a boil. When, at the end of the movie, a policeman wearily asks, "Is it even your fault?" it's not the director throwing in a glib sociological excuse for Freddy's actions, but a logical extension of the compassionate understanding he has brought to his subject, and the humanistic spirit that gives this wonderful movie its title.