NOW 49, Bruno Dumont shot corporate videos by day and taught philosophy by night for the best part of two decades before he directed his debut feature, La Vie de Jesus (1996). Since then his work has become a magnet for festival prizes.

Three years later at Cannes, he collected the runner-up award, the Grand Prix du Jury, for L'Humanite (which also took the festival's two acting prizes) and Dumont received the same award at Cannes  last year for Flandres. Not surprisingly, there were no prizes for his wildly self-indulgent 2003 sex odyssey Twentynine Palms, shot in the California desert.

Flandres returns Dumont to the familiar milieu of his earlier movies, the rural area of northern France where he was born, for another unremittingly grim view of provincial life. He later steers this minimalist narrative towards a different desert, and his use of landscape in both settings is striking.

Working yet again with nonprofessionals, Dumont casts Samuel Boidin (from La Vie de Jesus) as Andre, a stolid, inarticulate young farmer in a sexual relationship with his childhood friend, Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux). As ever in a Dumont movie, their sexual couplings are brief, joyless and functional, and they have little to say to each other.

Andre and two other young local men are conscripted to fight in an unnamed war. Asked where he is going, he says he doesn't know, and nor do we, although the desert terrain suggests Iraq or Afghanistan. (These scenes were shot in Tunisia.) An early skirmish when the French come under sniper fire catches the fear and confusion of armed conflict.

However, action, when it occurs in a Dumont film, is infrequent, and most often, sexual, as in a disturbing scene when three soldiers violently gang rape a young woman. Back home, Barbe continues to make herself sexually available to other men, and one utterly perfunctory encounter aptly takes place in a barn.

This bleak, uncompromising film ultimately prompts the conclusion that it is predicated on a view of the male as animalistic aggressor, whether having sex (forced or consensual) or at war.