Directed by Bruno Dumont
Released January 2, 2015
When we get our first glimpse of the title character of Li’l Quinquin what is most striking is the façade we’re offered: a child whose face is permanently in a smirk, his eyes glaring with an intensity that isn’t yet understood. For all his early puckishness, Quinquin is allowed to develop over the course of the film’s leisurely four-hour duration into both a sympathetic child stuck in small town stasis and a horrible representative of the innate bigotry too often found in France. The deft way Bruno Dumont comments upon the racist tendencies of his homeland has an added impact in the post-Charlie Hedbo, post-Bataclan period, a striking moment in time when the structural prejudices that continue to hold back France from its aspirational role as the most modern and progressive of countries has given way to the rise of ISIS-inspired terrorism and the empowering of the ultra-conservative National Front. Dumont’s work was released for television over a year before all of this happened, and yet its critique nevertheless feels incisive.
And yet all this is pulled off in one of the kookier murder mysteries this side of a Kaurismaki film. In a land filled with a detective showing off the most nervy of nervous facial tics, a deputy who wants desperately to be a stock car driver, and church figures who struggle to not laugh at the ridiculousness of their own practices, there is a central plot to mine about people murdered, dismembered, and seemingly stuffed into the anuses of local cows. That there’s more to the story would be enough of a hook, but when the person trying to delve into this mystery is a detective that exudes equal parts Inspector Clouseau and Agent Dale Cooper means buffoonery and New Age inspiration can be let loose in a town that seems to already be on edge from the sexual, racial, and ethnic tensions that are constantly being poked by the townsfolk. One looking for a procedural that will explain the central mystery — or for that matter anything, really — might find the jocular style Dumont employs to be exceedingly infuriating. This is, no doubt, one of the most elliptical murder plot lines put together since David Lynch and Mark Frost killed off Laura Palmer.
Comparisons to Twin Peaks are, most definitely, merited. Both works use the seeming simplicity of their settings to delve into the underbelly of a small town, thanks in large measure to the threads that can be connected to a gruesome murder. But Dumont’s vexing provincial style means that in place of Little Men from Another Place and Black Lodges are mentally handicapped uncles and local talent fairs. The elements may be more mundane but their direct and indirect connections to an evil lying within man is no less potent.
