L’Empire – first-look review

This new film from French film­mak­er Bruno Dumont is mad as a bag of span­ners. In many ways it marks the sum total of a sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic project which has tra­versed the spec­trum of high seri­ous­ness in the past to high slap­stick in the present. In fact, Dumont was often mocked for what many thought to be stern, depres­sive and cal­cu­lat­ed­ly alien­at­ing stud­ies of bore­dom and vio­lence (1999’s L’Humanite being the break­through in that respect), but in light of a recent run of musi­cals, satires, and lunatic come­dies, maybe he’s always been a jok­er at heart?

This dual­i­ty of rea­son which sits inside the soul of every human makes for the sub­ject mat­ter of his mad­cap lat­est, L’Empire, a loose­ly-con­ceived and freeform sci­ence-fic­tion yarn set among the war­ring fac­tions of two alien races hid­ing inside the bod­ies of var­i­ous work­ing class denizens of North­ern France’s Opal Coast. Dumont has lit­tle time for basic nar­ra­tive log­ic, instead imbu­ing his film with the feel of an impro­vised farce, where all aspects of char­ac­ter and set­ting are indis­tinct enough to allow for the sto­ry to be pushed into wild new direc­tions at the drop of a hat.

Jony (new­com­er Bran­don Vlieghe) is a fish­er­man sport­ing dowdy over­alls and is strug­gling to make much of a catch these days. He lives with his moth­er who tends for his tod­dler son, Fred­die. Yet it is soon revealed that Fred­die is in fact an apoc­a­lyp­tic demon lord sired by Jony who is him­self alien roy­al­ty with­in an evil inter­galac­tic sect called the Zeros who are intent on destroy­ing the universe. 

Jane (Ana­maria Var­tolomei, seen recent­ly in the Gold­en Lion-win­ner, Hap­pen­ing) is a One, an ethe­re­al war­rior sen­tinel who also lives in a lit­tle house with her chain-smok­ing moth­er. She is an oppos­ing force for all that is good and light, and she and her hench­man scour the coastal paths and cul-de-sacs and strate­gi­cal­ly behead the evil Zeros with a triple-pronged light sabre. Their bod­ies melt away reveal­ing the oily float­ing glob­ules that are hid­den inside.

The sto­ry, such as it is, sees Fred­die kid­napped and returned numer­ous times via ran­dom home inva­sions; a few bouts of al fres­co sex as the aliens deign to appre­ci­ate the phys­i­o­log­i­cal advan­tages of their fleshy dis­guis­es; and the occa­sion­al inter­rup­tion from a pair of bum­bling local cops (the tic-rid­den cap­tain and his naïve lieu­tenant from Dumont’s Lil Quin­quin films) who are entire­ly bemused by all the ongo­ing strangeness.

In its favour, L’Empire offers a com­plete­ly unique take – both aes­thet­i­cal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly – on the time­worn alien inva­sion genre, sub­vert­ing and satiris­ing much of its stock imagery to cre­ate a broad alle­go­ry about every human hav­ing the poten­tial to be good and evil. The design stu­dious­ly melds clas­si­cism and futur­ism, with the orbit­ing space sta­tions tak­ing the form of pris­tine cathe­drals, and it’s a very clever and well-exe­cut­ed conceit. 

But its stern insis­tence to avoid coher­ence also will make this one some­thing of a chal­lenge for those not attuned to Dumont’s freaky new wave­length. Char­ac­ter devel­op­ment or basic rea­son­ing as to why one action leads to anoth­er are point­ed­ly miss­ing in action, but that, in many ways, is all part of the fun of this unabashed­ly per­son­al cine-UFO. 

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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