L’Empire – first-look review

A lunatic piece of sci-fi social realism in which Bruno Dumont brings flying churches and sexed-up aliens to France's Opal Coast.

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 naive 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.

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