Hors Satan

There´s a mysterious vagabond in the English Channel, in the Pas-de-Calais region, who wanders around shing, praying, and spending time with a girl from a local farm who feeds, follows, and takes care of him. Dumont uses the entire width of the screen to depict an enigmatic tour through streams, fields, and copses under a constantly grey sky (like in Flandres), during which this anchorite will change into some kind of anonymous avenger or serial killer without that altering his quiet tone. The film´s calm timing, few words and constant wind sound, create an unreal sensation, a dreamlike feel that puts history and contemporary times in parenthesis and enables a trance state that gets us close to a place half way between ideal and mythical, where Good and Evil face each other. Just like in his debut film The Life of Jesus, and his recent Hadewijch (released in Argentina as “Between Faith and Passion”) religion runs across the film. However, I don´t agree with what some reviews said after the film´s Un Certain Regard premiere in Cannes 2011, which accused the film of justifying a certain evilness or corrective violence in a world where the devil does as he pleases. As it happens with moments of sexual tension (which are more stranged and less explicit than in Twentynine Palms), in Hors Satan feelings rule over discourses. You feel the wind on your face, certainties fade, everything is run through by an intangible uncertainty, and all that is left for us to do is surrender to this sort of uchronia that allows itself to question the issue of faith and humanity from a perspective that seems anchored more in a primal, basic intuition than in reason. FEJL

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