Bruno Dumont was always a bit off. Initially he was bundled in with the directors of the so-called ‘New French Extremity’, alongside Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noé (a label bearing all the hallmarks of lazy journalese – though all the filmmakers involved did have a predilection for past-the-watershed violence). But then neither did Dumont’s output sit easily within social realism. He was not the straightforward heir to Bresson that many critics wanted him to be, despite the seeming austerity and reliance on non-actors in early films such as L’humanité (1999) and Flanders (2006). Whether it was Pharaon (the not-quite-there detective Dumont cast from a mental institution) levitating in an allotment at the grizzly end of L’humanité or the anachronism of war-on-terror soldiers riding through Fallujah on donkeys in Flanders, for those looking carefully enough his early work was shot through with glimpses of a dark fantasy that suggested that Calais – the region of northern France that he has marked his territory in nine of his 12 features – and its people might in fact belong to another world altogether.
This otherworldly quality has been, however, fully dialled up since his cult television series Li’l Quinquin (2014) and CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans (2018) (Twin Peaks in Le Pen country), the cannibalesque Edwardian romp Slack Bay (2016), and his two Joan of Arc musicals. I once heard it said the first time Dumont’s long-running producer Jean Bréhat saw the Grand Prix-winning masterpiece L’humanité, he remarked: ‘Christ it’s boring, but it must be good’ – who knows what he said after leaving the test screening for the French auteur’s latest effort, the sci-fi Catholic farce The Empire (running at a budget equivalent to Dumont’s first four futures).
Dumont’s intellectual preoccupations have not changed much in 25 years. His concerns remain the persistence of Manichaean ideas of good and evil in an insistently secular society, the build-up of unexplainable moments of apocalyptic terror in our new millennium, the limits of speech and that which can be spoken (especially pronounced in the expressions of the near-mute non-actors common throughout his early work), the apoplectic enfeeblement of (moral or scientific) rationalisms when confronted with phenomena that defy them, and the slippages between civilization and barbarism. (Remember that Dumont only took up filmmaking following a stint as a prof of moral philosophy.) Nor has his formal approach to cinema changed much, as he more or less always shoots in the same exploratory and improvisatory style in the same picturesque parts of northern France, with the same crew. Yet with each work since Li’l Quinquin Dumont has arguably used these same fixed means to stake out a delirious and urgent form of comedy wholly his own. The Empire is no exception—the arc of Dumont’s moral universe is long, and now it bends toward space opera.
Though superficially resembling sci-fi farces such as Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers or Woody Allen’s Sleeper, beneath the light-sabres and the goofiness of its genre frottage The Empire doesn’t really care very much about science fiction. In fact I sat there wondering if he’d seen any sci-fi films released since 1985. Here was one of Europe’s most ambitious auteurs continuing to explore what he doesn’t quite understand; approaching film as a form of quasi-spiritual meditation. It was a Cardinal Newman sermon on the problem of evil, soundtracked by an iPhone alarm clock (truly the devil’s music) and an amateur youth orchestra plodding through Bach.
In a fishing village on the Calais coast, a struggle for supremacy is being waged between the forces of good (the 1s) and evil (the 0s), orchestrated from both group’s respective deep-space bases (which represented the all-too-distant meddling Metropoles, or—Paris). On Earth both sides parley this great battle through their part-human, part-demon/angel sentinels. The lug-eared lobster fisherman representing the evil 0s is Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), who protects his demon-child, ‘The Wain’, accompanied by a group of knights on horseback (themselves resembling the troupe of miscreant motorcyclists from The Life of Jesus). It’s an exceptional turn by the non-actor Vlieghe – in real life a mechanic – whose unflappable manner rescues the film from its more whimsical flights. Anamaria Vartolomei’s Jane, meanwhile, is the light-saber-wielding missionary of the 1s, whose angelicism is tested by her human-all-too-human desire to fuck Satan’s messenger in a field.
Orchestrating events from afar for the 1s is a giant blob of vocoded black ooze flying through space in a ship styled on Naples’s Caserta Royal Palace. For the 0s there’s a reverse-speaking HAL-style orb situated in a hyperbolized Saint-Chapelle. Orb and church eventually assume human form as Beelzebub (Fabrice Luchini) and the Queen (Camille Cottin), respectively. Luchini in particular brings an antic relish to his turn as the Prince of Darkness, channelling something between Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Burton’s Batman and Cruella de Vil. The film continues with Dumont’s latest innovation of throwing correctly proportioned, golden-mean-abiding ingénues with no obvious facial irregularities (Léa Seydoux in 2021’s France, and this time Lyna Khoudri and Vartolomei) into the mix alongside the extraordinary Honoré Daumier-like faces he scouts from the Calais beaches or through randomly knocking on doors. The effect radically heightens the social, and often civilizational, breach that ordinarily keeps such faces from ever exchanging more than a few cursory remarks, let alone kissing one another.
If this all sounds utterly preposterous and, to a certain degree, indulgent – that’s probably because it is. Yet neither indulgence nor preposterousness should be outlawed from contemporary arthouse filmmaking when the result is this daring, visually imaginative, immune to compromise, or apocalyptically fun. Despite its formidable budget and the impressive assistance of the SFX studio that brought us The Mandalorian, The Empire is (mercifully) not a film that trusts the implicit moral universe of contemporary science fiction. Instead Dumont builds a grand empire out of the sand of the Calais beaches, before allowing it to entirely dissolve again, not with a bang but a whimper in the unashamed deus ex machina of his final set piece (which is more reminiscent of René Magritte’s ‘Golconda’ than George Lucas), in a sort of bathetic cosmic shrug.
George MacBeth is a writer and editor based in Berlin. His writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux, and Spike. He is currently working on his first collection of fiction.
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