Humanite could plausibly get any rating from one to five stars, as evidenced by its all-over-the-map reception at the 1999 Cannes festival, where it was heckled, mocked, and ultimately awarded the Grand Jury prize as well as the Best Actor and Best Actress awards (by a panel headed by David Cronenberg). What is ostensibly the story of a hopelessly clueless cop's investigation of a brutal child murder in a small coastal French town turns out to be a slow extended prolonged drawn out leisurely really very slow and long look at the life of the cop, Pharaon De Winter ( played doggedly by Emmanuel Schotte), which is presented as an anthropological case study or unending Wild Kingdom episode about Man. Rarely has so much screen time been devoted to close-ups of clogged pores and sagging flesh and other textures of cosmetic-free unglamorous regular folks, or to uninterrupted cough takes or joyless animal rutting. The film's pace is frequently termed "glacial," but with its recurring shots of fields and communal gardens it's more like watching grass (or body hair) grow. With only four significant characters -- Pharaon, Domino (the woman down the block he's infatuated with), her loutish boyfriend Joseph, and the town's police chief (Pharaon's boss) -- and only the slimmest of plots, Dumont still takes two and a half hours to raise more questions than he answers. But this resolutely unpredictable and at times unpalatable strangeness is Humanite's greatest strength--when it's over your generic expectations of what a crime story must include have been severely tested. Pharaon is kind of a blend of Forrest Gump and Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and his sporadic involvement with the murder case results in some truly bizarre interactions, with much suspect-sniffing and a lot of weeping. By the film's end Pharaon seems to be both beast and angel, a sluggish lump in whom thought never quite succeeds in blooming but whose capacity for empathy and desire often truly surprises. Dumont owes something to Bresson, and to the Danish Dogma crowd, but there's absolutely nothing corporate or cookie-cutter or even faux-Godardian about Humanite, and a dose of ambitious, evocative artistic pretension can be helpful now and then, much like a colon blow.