Thirty-year-old Pharaoh is an unsophisticated and humble man. He is simple but not a simpleton. He has a crush on his sexy neighbor, factory worker Domino (Severine Caneele), a gentle soul in love with a brute named Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaoh's daily life is quite dull; he is a police lieutenant, a job that does not agree with his mild temperament. He has to investigate the rape and murder of a little girl. What makes Pharaoh different from others is the suffering he goes through due to his uncontrollable empathy for other human beings. He is an emotional sponge condemned to carry the burden of all our wrongdoings. He is hungry for human feelings to the point that he would smell the face of the suspect he interrogates. In the final analysis, he also is a Jesus figure, like the hero of the first film. The message is there is no place for such figures in our cruel world. Bruno Dumont has a lot of compassion for his characters, which is evident in the way that he observes their daily lives and the conflicts that they are faced with. Explicit sexual scenes may offend some viewers. L'humanité won the Grand Prize of the 52nd Cannes Film Festival, 1999. Actress Severine Caneele shared the Best Actress award with Emilie Dequenne of Rosetta and Emmanuel Schotte won the Best Actor award.

Excerpt from B+N located HERE

***

The transcendent second feature by Bruno Dumont probes the wonder and horror of the human condition through the story of a profoundly alienated police detective (the indelibly sad-eyed Emmanuel Schotté, winner of an upset best actor prize at Cannes for his first film performance) who, while investigating the murder of a young girl, experiences jolting, epiphanous moments of emotional and physical connection. Demonstrating Dumont’s deftness with nonactors and relentlessly frank depiction of bodies and sexuality, L’humanité is at once an idiosyncratic police procedural and a provocative exploration of the tension between humankind’s capacity for compassion and our base, sometimes barbarous animal instincts.

***

I think Dumont’s film is unfinished in the sense that some paintings are; that is, some parts of the “canvas” are only sketched in while other parts are fully realized. As a mannerist portrait of a few individuals, it’s often amazing; as a spiritual statement about suffering in the contemporary world, it almost lives up to its title; for its blunt depictions of sex, it’s about as carnal in an unvarnished way as filmmaking can get; and as a visual rendering of an area of northern France (Dumont’s hometown, also the setting of his first feature, The Life of Jesus), it’s pretty impressive. But as a police procedural, it’s unsatisfying, far from being worked out in all its details.

Some of the details are even in direct conflict with some of the virtues I listed. For one thing, as Dumont pointed out in an interview with Toronto critic Mark Peranson, the film doesn’t qualify in any way as “realist,” though the nonprofessional actors and the locations may occasionally foster that impression—and lead one to expect a verisimilitude in the plot and the psychology of the characters that the film doesn’t furnish.

There’s nothing wrong about any of this. Given Dumont’s Dostoyevsky-like ambitions, it’s the most honorable sort of failing imaginable. Yet because it’s a movie and not a painting or a symphony, this failing has made some people angry. Last year a Cannes jury headed by David Cronenberg awarded L’humanité the grand jury prize and awards for best actor (Emmanuel Schotte) and actress (Severine Caneele, in a tie with Rosetta’s Emilie Duquenne), and the international press was scandalized. That both Schotte and Caneele were nonprofessionals contributed to the outrage, but other issues relating to “professionalism” were also at play—above all, conformity to genre expectations. The dramatic payoff in Dostoyevsky is hardly the same thing as the dramatic payoff in a serial-killer mystery, and anyone looking for the latter clearly felt cheated.

Excerpt from Jonathan Rosenbaum's review at the Chicago Reader located HERE.