“Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
n the seven years since , it has become impossible to continue tagging Bruno Dumont with the longstanding cliches of Bresson criticism. Epithets like “ascetic,” “severe,” “punishing”—already limited descriptors of his first two works, (1997) and (1999)—have only become more obviously incapable of describing Dumont’s recent films, from the carnivalesque contortions of (2016) to the musical extremes of his Jeanne d’Arc movies. Still, as Dumont’s methods (particularly his increasingly frequent use of professionals alongside non-actors) have ostensibly moved away from those of Bresson, the deeper affinities between the two filmmakers have only become clearer. More effectively than did (2013), demonstrated that the affective qualities of Bresson’s “involuntarily expressive models” and the—a film quite literally anchored by Lea Seydoux, playing celebrity TV journalist France de Meurs—Dumont has chosen an ideal milieu in which to explore this principle.
