Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2004)

Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms breaks away from his native Bailleul area of France to the west of America, to the eponymous area with its nearby Joshua trees in the desert. David (David Wissak) and Katia (Katia Golubeva) are the only two actors of any importance in the film, which Dumont intended to be experimental – he had no interest in the dialogue, the story or the characters. It concerns a photographer and his girlfriend driving from Los Angeles in a Hummer to a motel in a desert situation. David is American and communicates with Katia in English and in French, only a basic knowledge of which he has: communication is therefore a problem and they have frequent arguments. They also have frequent very noisy and very violent sounding sex in the desert or in the motel or in the swimming pool.

What the viewer sees is the road, the dirt tracks, the gas stations, the naked bodies, etc, and hears a little of two languages and occasional soundtrack. Nothing much happens until towards the end, when a car appears immediately behind the Hummer on a dirt track in a desert in the middle of nowhere. The Hummer pulls off, the car follows it and hits it. David and Katia get out of the Hummer, three men get out of the car, Katie is stripped naked and held but not physically abused in any other way, whereas David is hit several times on the head with a baseball bat and raped noisily by the third man as David looks at Katia and she screams. The men drive off and Katia crawls to David.

Back at the hotel David is still living, doesn't want to call the police, and after Katia insists that she loves him he inexplicably knifes her a number of times, I suppose confirming – definitively – the nature of the love-hate relationship. The last static scene is from a distance, where we see David's body on the ground in the desert and a cop radioing his fellow workers to block the road. From reading reviews I knew a shock was coming so that knowledge reduced the shock, although nothing here is really explicit.