Star Rating: ***
Dir: Bruno Dumont
With: Samuel Boidin, Adelaide Leroux

Having made an unwise detour to America with Twentynine Palms, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont returns home to the more familiar territory of northern France where he made his celebrated Cannes prize-winning films La Vie de Jesus and L'Humanite.

Flandres, which won the Grand Prize at Cannes last year, is, like Dumont's earlier films, a very bleak drama that will divide audiences.

It concerns a French farmer, Demester, who's unable to express emotion to his neighbour and childhood sweetheart, Barbe, with whom he has loveless sex, which in turn prompts the frustrated girl to seek likewise elsewhere.

Their brutal relationship is mirrored later on by Demester's experience as a soldier fighting in an unnamed war in the Middle East, and through these spare twin storylines Dumont makes comment on the bestial nature of man.

It's tough stuff, and purposefully so, but Dumont's shock tactics for laying bare the human condition are becoming schematic and starting to wear thin.