It isn't easy to defend Bruno Dumont, a French director of great skill whose view of the human race is so pessimistic and without obvious sympathy in this remarkable winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. Flanders is a film you'll either admire or hate.

The characters are a group of lumpen young men and women from a remote village in northern France. The men are suddenly conscripted into the army to fight in an unspecified Arab country, which could well be Iraq. There, they brutalise and are brutalised in turn.

The film starts with a farmer (Samuel Boidin) and his girl (Adelaide Leroux) in a bleak and hostile countryside rutting much like the animals they keep. It ends with brutal hand-to-hand fighting, violent rape and castration in an even darker and more desolate landscape. This is war as it probably is, entirely without sentiment.

"I do not want to build. I destroy and deform. And in this deformation, expression occurs," says Dumont. You may consider him pathologically deformed himself, but he is capable of confrontational films like this one, L'Humanité and The Life of Jesus, that are very difficult to forget.

One thing is certain. Now back on his home territory after making the weird and not very wonderful Twentynine Palms in America, he has become once again an extraordinary filmmaker who remorselessly pursues his own way past conventional methods and a chorus of negative criticism.