Synopsis
David, an independent photographer, and Katia, an unemployed woman, leave Los Angeles, en route to the southern California desert, where they search a natural set to use as a backdrop for a magazine photo shoot. They find a motel in the town of Twentynine Palms and spend their days in their sport-utility vehicle, discovering the Joshua Tree Desert, and losing themselves on nameless roads and trails. Frantically making love all the time and almost everywhere, they regularly fight, then kiss and make up, with little else going on in their empty relationship and quite ordinary daily life--until something horrible and hideous brutally puts an end to their trip.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Yekaterina GolubevaKatia
- David WissakDavid
Recommendations
- 100
New York Post
At turns sexy, ultra-violent and sweet, it will infiltrate your brain long after you've seen it. - 75
Christian Science Monitor
Dumont's methods are radical, but there's a fascinating method to his seeming cinematic madness. - 60
The New York Times
The sustained force of Mr. Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker. - 58
Entertainment Weekly
This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness; Dumont even manages to make sex in the desert boring. - 50
The New Yorker
The latest minimalist provocation from the infuriating but talented French director Bruno Dumont. [12 April 2004, p. 89] - 30
The Hollywood Reporter
Ultimately a hollow and pointless exercise. - 30
Los Angeles Times
Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads. - 20
Chicago Reader
Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it's exceptionally ugly and unpleasant.
