It must have been a small-budget film and it shows. Sort of a travelogue with sex and violence, it meanders along the byways of Jumbo Rocks and Twentynine Palms, California.<br /><br />Impressive, dignified scenery, and that's about it. Katia plays Katia, who speaks only French. David plays David, who speaks English and some French that falls just short of execrable, which is to say very much like my French. From some angles she looks a bit like Michelle Pfeiffer and from some angles he resembles Harry Dean Stanton. It's difficult to comment on their acting because, aside from some memorized exchanges, it seems that most of the time the director simply aimed the camera their way and said, "Okay, make something up." There's a good deal of playful poking and laughter, like that in John Cassavetes' films. People chuckle and giggle because they can't seem to think up anything else to do.<br /><br />The couple has squabbles and sex. The reasons for the squabbles? Let's see. He looks at another woman in a cafe. He buys her ice cream and asks if she likes it. "C'est bon," she replies, then, "Pas bon." (He sulks because she contradicts herself.) He hits a dog while driving the Hummer because she's blocking his window. Another argument, a serious one, occurs when she locks herself in the bathroom for reasons unexplained.<br /><br />Is there sex? Yes, there is sex, simulated, and a lot of nudity. I had a sneaking suspicion that Katia and David weren't even married, yet here they are, stripping off in the desert, revealing themselves in all their hairy, angular, bilaterally symmetrical splendor. They lie on abrasive rocks, spreadeagled shamelessly. A couple of airliners pass overhead and any passenger who wanted to could look down on them from 37,000 feet and watch them rut and squirm like two javelinas. They don't care. They fornicate on rocks, in swimming pools, and in motel rooms. Oh, and speaking of animals, when David has an orgasm he makes more noise than Katia, although, to be sure, both of them overact in these scenes like porno superstars. What repugnant physicality.<br /><br />The movie drags along for quite a while and when the climax comes we are totally unprepared for it. I don't know whether to get into it or not. I don't think I will, except to say that the scene seems to have been brought in from another movie entirely, some kind of slasher flick with a title like "Blood and Cactus". The heavies seem to be either Marines or skinheads, maybe both. The final episode of violence takes place for reasons that escape me completely.<br /><br />Maybe I missed something. Could it be that life is like a road? It has its asphalt pavement and its potholes? Occasional stop signs? Long waits while indifferent freight cars rumble slowly through the crossing, sometimes stopping completely? And at the end you have a fatal traffic accident? This is a French movie so maybe I used the wrong national heuristic. The point of a French film might be that there is no point. That's the whole point.<br /><br />In the end I found the film kind of sad. Not just because of what happens to Katia and David, but for reasons the producers probably never intended. At the beginning the couple stare in awe at acres and acres of energy-generating windmills arrayed across the desert. They find it splendid. I didn't. The ivory sand is dotted with Joshua trees and creosote bush, and littered with flowery paper wrappers, glittering aluminum cans and empty shotgun shells. The Hummer matter-of-factly passes a pile of half a dozen huge, black, discarded tires. If you fly into LAX there are days when you can see the smog as far inland as Twentynine Palms. The point I took away from the film is that if you treat a natural landscape as a garbage dump it becomes a garbage dump sooner or later. A desert ecosystem is a fragile one and, like a human life, can only take so much abuse before it is destroyed.