It's clear from other reviews that more or less everybody is agreed about the director's rather tricksy film-making and the lack of conventional narrative drive. It's just a question of whether you think these things make for a good film or a bad film.

For me, the good outweighs the bad: the deliberately non-emotional characterization, slow pace, and powerful use of landscape push viewers out of their comfort zone, and force us to confront some pretty basic realities about life and war.

It's the parallels - not the contrasts - between home life and the war that are most interesting. On many occasions, the film seems to have a deliberately timeless, ahistorical feel, so that the characters feel tremendously elemental (the word medieval springs to mind too) in their behaviours and concerns. Despite a slight lack of coherence (not necessarily in the plot, more in the overall conception), we do genuinely somehow care for the characters - quite an achievement given the overall tone of the movie.

The use of Flanders as the setting and title reinforces this sense of historical continuity, of war recurring down through the ages - not for nothing is the region known as "the cockpit of Europe". And by the way, a big chunk of historical Flanders is now in France (the French-plated cars, with "59" indicating the North department which includes most of French Flanders, are a giveaway). French Flanders is by definition not in Belgium, as one reviewer has suggested. However, one of the female characters (Barbe's friend) appears to have a strong Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking) accent - a nice touch, and not entirely implausible in this border region, where a few people still speak Flemish on the French side of the border (visit Hondschoote, and you'll see what I mean).

This film should make everybody rethink their approach to war, and the impact of sending young men (and women, although not in this film) from more or less every generation off to fight and die (remember that Flanders was scarred by war twice in a lifetime in the 20th century). Not necessarily a particularly easy watch on the face of it, but a powerful and worthwhile one.

What is surprising in this film is the way the director uses a very simple minimalistic style of telling a story to cope with one of the most important themes of the contemporary world - the involvement of the young people in Western countries in wars that happen in the third world. This is the story of two young men from some rural place in Northern France or French speaking Belgium who are sexually involved with the same girl before being sent to fight a war in a remote Islamic country. The girl has her own mental problems and has an abortion while the young men face all possible horrors of war, face death, commit and are subjected to unimaginable violence. All is told in very simple, well filmed and clear images, and this creates a strong emotional impact. With simple cinematographic tools the director sends a message of distress and pain about the conflicts human beings are subjected to in the world today. Worth watching.

Flandres won the grand prize at Cannes, so somebody must have liked it. I didn't, much. The film takes a depressed, and depressing, look at the life of a French peasant, who becomes a soldier in a nameless war somewhere in the Mideast. At the beginning of the movie, we see him doing farm chores, wandering around the muddy barnyard with a pig (a heavy-handed metaphor Eisenstein would have loved), and having Hobbesian sex with his girlfriend (nasty, brutish and short, possibly the least erotic scene of consensual sex ever filmed.) Later he denies that they are a couple, so she takes revenge by immediately going off with another man. Good for her, and too bad she can't stay away from this brute.

Both of the heroine's lovers are drafted and sent to some faraway desert land where they join a small platoon. The men know nothing about the war, and seem to care less. They fight when they have to, and some of them, including our hero, rape a lone woman when they get the chance. The woman turns out to be a rebel officer, and when the men are captured she has one of them castrated and shot. He turns out not to be one of the men who raped her. No justice here, just chance and random cruelty --- we get the point.

Our hero eventually escapes, after leaving the girl's other lover, who is wounded, to be killed by the rebels. (Not that any heroism on his part would have helped, they would merely both have been killed.) He has been moved enough by his experience to mutter "I love you" as they have sex again. This time the sex is just as boorish, but the sun is shining and the girl has an air of resignation rather than frustration.

The film is well made in a minimalist sort of way, for which its director has been much praised. However, I felt that the points have been made before, and more effectively. I also thought I detected a whiff of condescension, the Paris intellectual looking down his fine long nose at the dirty peasants and their humdrum lives devoid of any real consciousness. I don't, personally, think that's fair.