From “The 400 Blows” to “The Florida Project,” kids have made fascinating cinematic subjects. Even if they’re working from scripts, there’s always the sense that they’re not entirely acting — that they can’t help but simply be themselves. The French director Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy professor who broke into Cannes nearly 30 years ago with his stark feature debut “The Life of Jesus,” has gravitated towards the raw naturalism of youngsters in the past. See “Li’l Quinquin” from 2014, and his musical curios about France’s patron saint “Jeannette,” (2017) and “Joan of Arc” (2019), all three of which find a strange, startling profundity in ragtag rugrats, say, debating theology or blankly witnessing acts of violence.
Childhood, for Dumont, isn’t a stage of pure innocence, but a transition period where adult behaviors are tried on by little ones who don’t entirely know what they mean, or what the stakes are. Such is the case with his latest feature, “Red Rocks,” which involves children roughly between the ages of five and seven jumping off cliffs, riding mini motorcycles and partaking in gang warfare — or its pre-verbal equivalent. Long, static, mostly wordless takes will make these activities seem less eventful than they sound. Patient arthouse viewers, however, will find much to chew on here as a subtly cerebral film about small bodies unsettlingly, hilariously navigating a big, violent world.
