Humanity

Exhibiting all the faults and almost none of the virtues of Dumont's earlier, far superior La Vie de Jésus, this is again set in an unrelentingly glum Pas de Calais, where Schotté's police lieutenant investigates the murder of a young girl whose mutilated body he's found in a field. The notion, that he's an ordinary, unremarkable man whose tendency to take the world's suffering - and sins - on his own shoulders makes him a latter-day saint, has a certain Bressonian appeal, but the clumsy performances (by local amateurs), the slow, faltering pace, and Dumont's seeming ignorance of the most basic police procedures (finger-printing, DNA, cross-examination, deduction) make for a turgid, pretentious and sometimes risibly implausible film.