TwentyNine Palms

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Movie Review by EDF

Starring: Katia Golubeva, David Wissak

Director: Bruno Dumont

There comes a time in life when you begin to question your actions, the way you act in front of other people and just to top it off, regrets about decisions you have made in your life. TWENTYNINE PALMS does not really feature any of these, as we will see in a few moments. Instead, as someone who tries to put in a good word about decent independent movies, where a smart script takes the place of a non-existent budget, again, TWENTYNINE PALMS seems to lack both and more. Where do I start? Oh yes, I woke up from my coma in the Intensive Care Unit of my local hospital. Why? For starters, this movie lacked, for the most part, anything that even resembled intense.

David (David Wassik) and Katia (Katia Golubeva) are on the highway travelling from LA to Twentynine Palms. Along the way they stop off to look at some scenery, arrive at their motel and have sex in the swimming pool. The next day, they explore the countryside around them by stopping to admire some Joshua trees, change drivers and then the first real exciting thing happens in the movie, Katia scratches the car against some twigs at the side of the dirt road. They head off to the sort of rock formation usually found in STAR TREK episodes and have sex. They climb one of the rock formations and they jump off. Only kidding folks, actually, they lie down and after a few minutes they get up to leave.

They head back to the motel and while in the swimming pool, David pushes Katia underwater so that she can give him a blowjob. Katia does not enjoy this and swims away. They make up and after a quick shower they head down to the supermarket. Nothing happens. They stop off at a café, order ice cream and then David sulks because most of the time he does not understand what Katia is talking about. They go back to the motel room and grunt their way through another hilarious session of sex. On another trip around the surrounding countryside, they go off the beaten track along the mountainside and get attacked by a bunch of rednecks. This is where something actually happens in the movie and to get to this point, you would have had to sit through an hour and a half of the most absolute time wasting nonsense I have ever witnessed to get to the final, kind of getting an excited twitch in my bones, 15 minutes of the movie. Welcome to the wild country, indeed.

So are there any redeemable features in this movie? No. The best part of the movie was the end credits. Yes, the scenery is nice to look at but seems dull due to the lack of colour throughout the movie. Apparently David is a photographer but this is not mentioned anywhere in the movie but does explain why every 15 minutes we get long, drawn out scenery shots. Every 20 minutes we watch the both of them having sex in different places and the last sex scene, if you really want to call it that, happens in a different place for David. There is a distinct lack of dialogue and most of it seems to be improvised to the point of utter drivel. Maybe this should have been a silent movie. At least then we would then have saved ourselves the torture of listening to Golubeva’s pathetic attempt at speaking French. The big question is why subject cinemagoers to this tripe when all that is vaguely interesting is when the movie turns into Deliverance near the end and even by then you really don’t care about anyone and anything until you get yourself far away from this stinker. Please, can I have 110 minutes of my life back?

0 out of 6 stars