Humanity

This film is considered to be Dumont’s best and artistically most accomplished work. In describing this antithesis of the detective story, the director said that he slowed down the pace of the action, limited dialogues to a minimum, froze the investigation and deprived the police of energy, conviction and skills (‘Kino’ 2000, no. 12). Dumont thus transfers the audience’s attention from the potentially thrilling plot to the metaphor of human existence that he deploys.

Humanity’s protagonist lives with his mother in Bailleul, Flanders. Like many of Dumont’s characters, detective Pharaon de Winter is modelled on a real, unprepossessing individual (Emmanuel Schotté) who caught the director’s eye. Schotté’s face is written with past love and loss, while his silhouette, awkward speech and movements, betray a sensitivity to the surrounding world. Pharaon spends his free time with his neighbour Domino, whom he secretly loves, and her boyfriend Joseph. But at work he is trying to solve the brutal rape and murder of an 11-year old girl. Confronted by a world of grief and cold reality, he begins to carry everyone’s sins on his conscience, facing evil in the only way he can understand.