THE EMPIRE (Bruno Dumont 2024)

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BRUNO DUMONT: THE EMPIRE (2024)

Dumont is back this time in a Star Wars spoof with more northern French rural oddities

With The Empire Bruno Dumont has taken his northern-rural-French-seaside series into a grand and CGI-assisted takeoff on Star Wars (and some other Hollywood extravaganzas), executed on a somewhat lower budget than the latter. This is a sci-fi comedy of a grand conflict of 1's against 0's, good against evil, with some stars. Fabrice Lucchini is back as evil incarnate, and the human form of a dark blob. There's Camille Cottin of "Call My Agent," Lynda Khoudri of Papicha and The French Dispatch, and Anamaria Vartolomei of Happening.

There are some strikingly beautiful moments, and there are striking visual extravagances like space ships in the form of French architectural landmarks. There is both hot French kissing and sex on screen, all out of doors.

But, alas, there isn't much rnythm of forward momentum, and the jokes aren't very funny. Still, for fans of recent Bruno Dumont cinema and a few stragglers, it's watchable, sort-of. And you can try to figure out why Adèle Haenel, Lily Rose Depp and Virginie Efira, originally announced as part of the cast, did not ultimately particpate. Is it sexist? Haenel surely found so.

Anyway, it's got decapitations by laser beam, and a car that wrecks and flips around a dozen times with a young women crawling out and a tiny child still sitting upright inside.

You may recognize the objects of mockery. Or you may just see Duont's idiosyncratic oddity. He creates his own language, and with it his own comic world. It may even seem funny and bizarre that he is referring to Star Wars with his rural beheadings by the roadside and skinny young female sunbathers here. This time he uses special effects he would hot have had access to in earlier films: the big shaking black blob, a human carcass that shinks suddenly into a puddle, heads chopped off with a laser beam, and those famous buildings in the form of space ships.

And always the stalwart, stolid French rural sprit remains present and strong: plump old ladies cluthcing little kids in arms stand in front of white provincial houses with blue shutters and neat tile roofs. There is a recurrant group of men on eight Boulonnais horses who call themselves the Knights of Wain (Fabrice Lucchini is, or is the father of, the Wain), and, for no apparent reason, the same recurrent bumbling pair of cops from recent films, the Commandant (Bernard Pruvost) with the nervous tic and his faithful Lieutenant (Philippe Jore) are back from Dumont's P'tit Quinquin.

Honestly if you are a fan of recent Bruno Dumont films this may seem better than ever. And it's got something new in the sci-fi CGI stuff, mostly in the form of airborne oddities like the vast recreations of the Palace of Versailles and two Notre Dames glued together, plus lots of little identical gadgets flying through the sky. All this was reputedly done for in the region of $8 million. Music is used really well at times to create a feeling, perpaps tougue in cheek, of awe and grandeur. All of this, as in other recent Dumon films, is rococo playfulness in stark contrast to the stunning emotional minimalism of powerful early Dumont works, the oes that drew critical attention, like The Life of Jesus, L'Humanité, or the 2009 Hadewijch. Current Dumont's films just don't have the power or the striking austerity of that early work at all any more, but they do still have unique qualities.

The Empire/L'Empire, 110 mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 18, 2024. It is still opening theatrically in some countries this year, such as Sweden, Hungary and Portugal. Winner of the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 2024 Berlinale. Now released in the US by Kino Lorber, the film comes to American Cinemas starting on Mar. 7, 2025 (IFC Center, NYC), with a national expansion to follow. Metacritic rating: 53%.