‘Flanders’ bears its director’s uncompromising and stark mark

French director Bruno Dumont has created four films that stake out their own difficult, uncompromising turf. His only problem is getting people to see them.

His 1999 film “L’humanite” won a big prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and his brutal “Twentynine Palms” was shot in the United States, in English. The new one, “Flanders,” also won a prize at Cannes.

None of this makes his films any more accessible. Austere and sometimes maddeningly opaque, his movies have divided audiences and critics right down the line.

The new one has two settings: Dumont’s native Flanders, an earthy realm of farms and barnyards, and an unspecified desert country where a war is being waged.

Three young men from the Flanders village are drafted and sent to the war zone, where we witness their dehumanized response, which includes murder, rape and betrayal.

But what happens at home is clearly just as important. Early on, we see the hulking Demester (Samuel Boidin) and his childhood friend Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) having mechanical sex. Later, Demester denies that they are involved, which leads Barbe to sleep with another soldier-to-be.

Despite the harrowing war scenes that follow, in some ways this is the decisive moment in the film: this denial of human emotion is a crime to Dumont, and all the other appalling acts in the movie seem to stem from it.

If you believe that, then the final sequences will be quite powerful. If you don’t believe it, then you’ll conclude that Dumont is wallowing in awfulness for its own sake, and has one of the bleaker views of mankind ever seen in movies.

As is his custom, Dumont’s actors are nonprofessional, and he rarely has them telegraph their feelings at all. Samuel Boidin’s ape-like looks immediately recall Vincent D’Onofrio in the opening section of “Full Metal Jacket,” and in some ways this film is a companion piece to Kubrick’s scathing take on war.

But “Flanders” is not so much a veiled “statement” about, say, Iraq, as it is a parable about emotional betrayal. And if Dumont ever finds a way to talk about the subject without horrifying his audience, maybe people will go see his films.