By Johnny Ray Huston

LEGEND AND PUBLISHED biography have it that French theorist Michel Foucault experienced a life-altering revelation upon visiting Death Valley in 1975. It might have been the LSD. Still, Foucault's initial tear-soaked epiphany moved beyond the typical "Now I see" response inspired by hallucinogens; his trip into the Californian desert led him to reformulate what became his largest and best-known work, The History of Sexuality. Twenty-five years later French filmmaker (and former philosophy professor) Bruno Dumont visited Joshua Tree. In interviews, he has summarized his reaction to that vast terrain in one word: fear. Though Dumont identified his fear as abstract, it produced something tangible: his third commercial feature, Twentynine Palms, a work that has made critical responses to the similarly barren-faring Brown Bunny seem tame.

Twentynine Palms's sexual mini-history would be an Adam and Eve tale capped by a particularly brutal fall from grace – if Dumont's protagonists possessed grace. But the director's philosophical background is Hobbesian, so American location scout David (David Wissak) and Russian girlfriend Katia (Katia Golubeva) exist in a state of nonstop struggle that qualifies them as genuine contenders for the title of most maddening couple in screen history. Detractors would surely beg to differ, but the high irritation factor of David and Katia's fight-and-fuck forays – dictated in mutually fumbled French, primarily marked by his creepy urge to dominate and her penchant for volcanic outburst – is wholly intentional. The film's orgasmic howls and its audience's discomforted titters and disdainful hoots have unfailingly formed a call-and-response pattern during Twentynine Palms's festival travels. Like it or not (most likely not), Dumont makes each spectator a third participant in his lead duo's futile power struggles. As long as the spectator remains in the theater.

Evidence that Dumont has a knack for hypnotizing haters can be found in any review that rages against Twentynine Palms's double-whammy climax, and there are plenty to choose from, most penned in (perhaps penned within?) red, white, and blue. This is a film that begs for – or demands – a reception-theory survey. A patriotic dedication to Hollywood values dictates most reviews, though one interesting exception – a regret-tinged dismissal by Dumont's chief U.S.-based champion, New York Press critic Armond White – instead reflects a consistent dislike for an antihumanist genre (horror).

Horror's perceived antihumanism is a key element to understanding Dumont's movie. The title of his previous feature translated to Humanity; whereas that work found him turning the detective genre inside out, a venture into horror results in an inversion not just of the genre but of his own approach. The proof is in the perspective. L'humanité's mystery hinged on the velocity-impaired vision of some strangers on a train that sped by a murder site; Twentynine Palms's sole moment of untroubled beauty captures the optical illusion generated by a train as it streams past a windmill-laden landscape.

Death doesn't enter that particular picture, but Dumont has already foreshadowed it with his first look at Golubeva's marble-white face. The doom-laden frustration built in to the film's action – or lack of it – is magnified by the soundtrack, which emphasizes whirring, grating environmental sound. Shot in Cinemascope, Twentynine Palms displays an outsider's wonder about U.S. spectacle – wonder haunted by a sense of menace that remains on the periphery until suddenly it doesn't. The unique sense of physical dis-ease Dumont rendered without special effects in his previous films is transferred to setting here, or replaced by pantomime.

This disconnect between Dumont and his performers, resolved through uncharacteristic, stylized depictions of violence, isn't present in the director's previous two films. It's based in more than the calculated shift from his home region of Bailleul (where L'humanité and 1997's La vie de Jésus are set) to southern Californian territory that has long drawn European "high tourists" (using Thom Andersen's term) such as Antonioni. For the first time, the director is working with – make that against – trained actors. Though their storm-crossed big-featured faces and frequent carnal urges fit the Dumont profile, his latest flesh-and-blood subjects signify something other, often less, than human existence. Golubeva was the apocalyptic siren of Leos Carax's box-office disaster Pola X. Wissak (previous résumé highlight: bit part on Law and Order) comes across as film industry flotsam.

Because Dumont has pared down the film's ingredients to a near elemental level, the sparse societal markers – including those actor filmographies – are placed in high relief. Filmed before March 2003, Twentynine Palms plays cat-and-mouse with U.S. militaristic and political power – and their Hollywood ties – simply through its choice of locale. Just as the civilized nuclear family in Wes Craven's dusty nightmare The Hills Have Eyes travel in a prototypical '70s gas-guzzler (a Winnebago), David and Katia drive a dirty red model of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's favorite vehicle, the Hummer. (Other aspects of Americana subjected to queries include Jerry Springer and a vanilla-flavored Taster's Freeze ice-cream cone.) The fact that Twentynine Palms has been registered as a stink bomb in the mailbox of that town's tourist industry (an article in one local newspaper spotlighted residents who claimed to be duped by the film's producers) is an adequate hint that Dumont isn't out to placate American self-perception.

Twentynine Palms is the antithesis of Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, reversing that film's increasingly prevalent Hollywood-in-France visual approach and giving Noé's male-rape hysteria a direct depiction. But in a recent Artforum essay, James Quandt deems the film a disappointing outgrowth of the "New French Extremism," a shock movement of sorts led by lesser (in his opinion and, to some degree, mine) directors such as François Ozon, Catherine Breillat, and Noé. Quandt's displeasure stems from considering Dumont "the true heir to Bresson," a link backed up by Dumont's writings about filming – which read like a parody of Notes on Cinematography – even if the director's new movie ultimately comes across as an urge to murder his forefather.

More often, Dumont's movie has garnered off-the-cuff comparisons to Gus Van Sant's similarly fatal desert sojourn in Gerry, a link that only bears mention when one takes into account that Van Sant remade Psycho, a gesture Dumont mimics on a smaller scale during one of two scenes in which Twentynine Palms's undercurrents of dread slice through the surface. (The motel-room setting may recall Psycho's, but Dumont's camera travels in the exact opposite direction from potty-minded Hitchcock's.) There's a paradox at the core of Twentynine Palms: violence that arrives with undeniably shocking impact bleeds whatever life there was out of the vision that came before it. Dumont succeeds at delivering a primal nightmare at our doorstep, yet the package is somewhat empty inside.

'Twentynine Palms' opens Fri/18, Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, S.F. (415) 267-4893; and Act I and II, 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 843-FILM. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times and prices.