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The approaching spring in New York City heralds the arrival of French cinema, whether it’s the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema program in early March, the release of films that were screened at the event, or the subsequent flood of international films that come out after the Oscars. Among the current crop of films, none stands out as the most unusual and exciting: Bruno Dumont’s Empire. Its eccentricity, evident even in its brief descriptions, is so strong that it risks overshadowing its unique artistry and brutal essence.
Empire is set in the present day, in a fishing village on the northern coast of France, where two groups of young people—close friends, bitter rivals, and flirtatious adversaries—stand at odds in a cosmic battle between Ones and Zeros. The Ones are loyal to the Queen of Good (Camille Cotten), whose headquarters is a cosmic cathedral connected to the area via an underwater portal. The Zeros serve Evil and its personified commander, Beelzebub (Fabrice Luchini), who issues his orders from a Versailles-like castle in the sky above the village. The focal point of this binary conflict is a baby named Freddy, known as “le Margat,” local slang for “the little one,” and rendered in the subtitles by the Scottish term “the Wain.” Johnny (Brandon Vliege), the Wayne’s father, is a warrior for the Zeros. Rudy (Julien Magnier), the child's mother's current partner, is a One-man warrior — and he has the lightsaber to prove it. As the title and plot suggest, Empire is a Star Wars parody that uses absurd elements on a cosmic scale to elevate local realism to the level of legend.
For all its eccentricity, Empire flows logically from the last decade or so of Dumont’s career, which has been an extraordinary torrent of imagination and observational wonder. The films that preceded it, in his first decade and a half in film, were mostly dark and restrained dramas, but in 2014 he changed course in a radical, turbulent way with Lil Quinquin. This made-for-TV film, running over three hours, is set in the same northern French coastal town, and although it’s a murder mystery, it has the tension of madness, personified by a pair of eccentric gendarmes (Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jaur) and exotic visions of nonetheless realistic provenance—like a dead cow being thrown into the air from a World War II bunker—along with depictions of endemic racism. Dumont took the same characters and settings to an even longer sequel, Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, adding another dimension of weirdness: to represent the rise of far-right anti-immigrant hostility in France, he presented the aliens in a more outlandish sense, as creatures from outer space. In other films of this period, Dumont expanded his mythology of the French north, as in Slack Bay, a screwball comedy of early twentieth-century aristocrats and fishermen, and in a pair of wonderful, phantasmagorical rock opera biographies of Joan of Arc, filmed on location. In 2021’s France, meanwhile, he offered a blistering satire of the contemporary media landscape. With Empire, he returns to the themes of Quinquin and Coincoin, bringing back the same gendarmes among a host of new characters and amping up the extravagance of the setting to reveal contemporary political monstrosities in mythic form.
In Empire, Dumont begins with the basics of romantic melodrama, showing the chance encounter between Joni, who is approaching the shore in his small boat after a day of fishing, and Lin (Lina Khoudri), who has just moved to the area and is sunbathing on a dune-sheltered beach. Dumont displays an almost documentary-like fascination with Joni’s workaday life and the ramshackle, cluttered landscape of the working-class neighborhood. But he quickly introduces the cryptic undertones of ritual: Joni kneels before his young son, who gestures toward him with regal bearing; three local children bow their heads as Lin passes; and Lin, in turn, kneels before the baby Freddy when she spots him through the family’s window. (“Is Wayne born?” she asks Joni, who responds in a voice altered, sepulchral to announce the presence of “the dark one.”) Rudy’s mission to capture Wayne is as chaotic as it is terrifying. The ensuing bloodshed leaves the two ludicrous gendarmes in disarray as Zero's cavalry charge in on short-legged white horses, with Johnny, Lin, Rudy, and the local One leader Jane (Anamaria Bartolomei) flanking them.
The ideological conflict dividing the two sides is clearly stated and
Sourse: newyorker.com
