The approach of springtime in New York means the arrival of French movies, whether via the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series in early March, the release soon afterward of movies presented there, or the post-Oscars spate of the previous year’s international films. Of those in theatres now, the most accomplished is also the most unusual: “The Empire,” by Bruno Dumont. Its oddity, evident in the barest descriptions, is so extreme as to threaten to overshadow its distinctive artistry and ferocious substance.
“The Empire” is set in the present day, in a fishing village on the northern coast of France, where two groups of young adults—friends and frenemies and flirtatious rivals—are in separate fealty to two opposing forces in a cosmic battle, the Ones and the Zeros. The Ones swear loyalty to the queen of Good (Camille Cottin), who’s headquartered in a space cathedral linked to the area via an undersea portal. The Zeros are sworn to Evil and to its incarnate commander, Beelzebub (Fabrice Luchini), who barks his orders from a Versailles-like castle in the sky above the village. The MacGuffin in this binary conflict is a baby named Freddy, known as “le Margat”—which is regional argot for “the little one” and is rendered in the subtitles with the Scots term “the Wain.” Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), the Wain’s father, is a warrior for the Zeros. Rudy (Julien Manier), the current partner of the baby’s mother, is a warrior for the Ones—and has a lightsabre to prove it. As the movie’s title and story suggest, “The Empire” is nothing less than a “Star Wars” parody that deploys giddy absurdities on a cosmic scale to exalt local realism into the realm of legend.
For all its absurdity, “The Empire” is a logical extension of Dumont’s past decade or so of filmmaking, which has been an extraordinary outpouring of imaginative and observational wonder. The movies that preceded this, in the first decade and a half of his directing career, were mainly grim and subdued dramas, but he shifted gears radically and exuberantly in 2014, with “Li’l Quinquin.” That film, made for TV and more than three hours long, is set in the same seaside town in northern France, and, though it’s a murder mystery, it has a strain of loopiness running through it, embodied by a pair of oddball gendarmes (Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore) and exotic visions of nonetheless realistic origin—for instance, a dead cow airlifted from a Second World War bunker—along with a view of endemic racism. Dumont put the same characters and settings into an even longer sequel, “Coincoin and the Extra-Humans,” which added yet another dimension of bizarrerie: to dramatize the rise of far-rightist anti-immigrant hostility in France, he showed aliens in the more extreme sense, creatures from outer space. In other films from this period, Dumont has expanded on his mythography of the French North, as in “Slack Bay,” a loopy early-twentieth-century comedy involving aristocrats and fishermen, and a remarkable pair of on-location phantasmagorical rock-opera bio-pics about Joan of Arc. Meanwhile, in “France,” from 2021, he offered a raging satire of the modern-day mediascape. With “The Empire,” he returns to the terrain of “Quinquin” and “Coincoin.” Bringing back the same gendarmes amid a host of new characters, he amplifies the setting’s extravagances to unfold current political enormities in mythic form.
In “The Empire,” Dumont starts from the basis of romantic melodrama, with the chance encounter of Jony, who comes to shore in his small boat from a day of fishing, and Line (Lyna Khoudri), who’s new to the area and has been sunbathing on the dune-sheltered beach. Dumont displays a quasi-documentary love for Jony’s work routine and for the ramshackle, piled-up landscape of the working-class neighborhood. But he quickly introduces mysterious tinges of ritual: Jony kneels toward his baby son, who gestures at him with regal poise; three local kids bow their heads as Line passes; and Line, in turn, kneels to the infant Freddy when she spies him through the family’s window. (“Is the Wain born?” she asks Jony, who answers in a sepulchral, manipulated voice to announce the presence of “the tenebrous one.”) Rudy’s mission to capture the Wain is as giddy as it is gruesome. The resulting bloodshed brings the pair of goofy gendarmes into bewildered action, as the Zero cavalry trots in on short-legged white horses and Jony, Line, Rudy, and the local One leader, Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei), deploy on their respective sides.
The ideological conflict dividing the two sides is expounded explicitly and depicted clearly in action. The Zeros believe that they’re fighting for the survival of their “race,” and, as their name suggests, they’re nihilists: Jony, ascending to the supreme leader’s palace, declares, “Supreme nothingness is nigh.” The Ones, by contrast, seek to purge humans of “vulgarity,” to “improve and raise them up” and to incline them to “higher things.” When Jane dives down deep and enters the sunken cathedral, the queen—in the form of a glowing blue orb—calls upon her to eradicate the Zeros, who “corrupt” humans, so that humanity may enjoy a reign of “solidarity and equality.” The battle between the cathedral and the palace is the battle between virtue and power.
Jane, however, has ideas of her own, telling Rudy that ordinary humans are neither good nor evil—“Everyone here is a balance of good and evil,” which is why “our battle is in their hearts.” Yet, when the queen’s vessel lands in the village, the forces of Good reveal their true colors—as the queen, emerging in the town, does so in the form of the mayor. Guided by Jane, who introduces her to local residents, the mayor finds humans “endearing and so amusing.” She’s sincere and benevolent, but her concept of improvement is abstract and impersonal. She doesn’t connect, and, when she meets a woman from the town, she speaks like a space alien with no understanding of the practical problems of ordinary people. Beelzebub, however, is nothing but evil incarnate, first appearing as a sort of metaphysical pollution—a writhing black oil-like glob suspended in midair. To do his dastardly business on Earth, Beelzebub must also appear human—and he steals the body of a nerdy tour guide (Luchini). Once infused with the diabolical spirit, the guide is transformed into a buffoon, complete with a harlequin outfit—a mad joker and a dancing fool who does a little jig to the sound of a jazz trio.
In “The Empire,” Evil is absolute, but Good could be better. Too often, the movie suggests, it is defeated by its own righteous rigor. Good needs better leaders, ones who are human both literally and metaphorically—whose role isn’t to uplift, but who grasp vulgarity as the human condition, and who instinctively share in the emotional lives and ordinary troubles of the people they presume to help. Dumont doesn’t stint on the Lucas-like dialectics, and he works wonders with wryly blunt yet nonetheless spectacular effects-driven action scenes. But, most exquisitely, he delights in visions of earthly, natural majesty. “The Empire” is a sumptuously nuanced landscape movie, with almost no interiors at all (except for the fantastic ones of the cathedral and the palace). As if looking with a renewed wonder at life on earth, Dumont films with avid curiosity about how things look and how people (and humanoids) move amid its entrancingly textured spaces—the green grass and the sere, sand and woods and sea, dirt roads and open fields and scruffy hillocks, even the modest charm of an outdoor market. He amplifies the sense of documentary by combining a quartet of well-known professional actors (Cottin, Luchini, Vartolomei, and Khoudri) with nonprofessional actors and directing them all in the same way—equipping them with earphones and speaking to them as the camera rolls. Finally, along with his passionately local vision, he offers a classically French solution to the overarching political impasse: namely, sex.
