Bruno Dumont’s long and winding road from severe Gallic art-house auteur to antic ringmaster of increasingly bizarre genre-twisting comedies takes its strangest turn yet with The Empire, an epic sci-fi farce rooted in the droll premise of an apocalyptic war between alien superbeings breaking out in a sleepy French seaside town. Combining gonzo humour, a colourful ensemble cast and strikingly impressive production design, the end result feels something like a Quentin Dupieux film with a Christopher Nolan-sized visual effects budget. The most unabashedly silly competition contender screening in Berlin this week, Dumont’s baroque space oddity ultimately falls short of its intergalatic ambitions, but it is still worth the ride for its WTF screwball twists and sporadically brilliant touches.
The Empire was billed in early publicity as a parody of Star Wars, and the parallels go deeper than than that faint homage buried in the title. The story features rival tribes of futuristic knights, light sabres, and epic battles between fleets of fighter spacecraft, all couched in a dime-store Lucasfilm philosophy about good and evil as opposing forces that co-exist in the hearts of humankind. But first and foremost, this is a French film, so it naturally opens with a sexy young nymphet sunbathing nude on golden sand dunes to wistful accordion music. This is Line (Lyna Khoudri), newly arrived in a sleepy seaside community in northern France, where she becomes strangely fixated on her geeky fisherman neighbour Jony (Brandon Vlieghe).
Behind his amusingly dorky, scruffy, deadbeat human facade, Jony is a powerful undercover agent for a vast army of evil space creatures, the Zeros, who answer to the prince of darkness himself, Beelzebub, played by Fabrice Luchini in full-blooded grand-farce mode. Jony’s cherubic little blond son Freddy is also an unlikely Antichrist in waiting, being groomed for the upcoming existential battle between the Zeros and their eternal enemies on the side of goodness, the Ones.
Meanwhile, Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei, breakout star of Audrey Diwan’s Happening (2021)) and Rudy (Julien Manier) watch over the town on behalf of the Ones, in the service of their leader, The Queen (Call My Agent veteran Camille Cottin). Taking human form to pass unnoticed on Earth, these shadow armies exist for now in an uneasy truce. There is even a sizzle of illicit sexual chemistry between Jony and Jane, who share a few steamy sex sessions for no apparent narrative reason. Did I mention this is a French film?
In typical Dumont style, The Empire features a mixed cast of professionals and amateurs, resulting in some comically stilted performances that are mostly played for maximum laughs. Some are veteran collaborators, notably Luchini, who previously worked with the director on Slack Bay (2016) and Joan of Arc (2019). Conspicuous by her absence is Adèle Haenel, the politically outspoken actress who initially signed on to play Jane, then left the project, accusing Dumont of endorsing a “dark, sexist and racist world.” Haenel, who confirmed her retirement from film acting soon afterwards, is a fine talent with admirable opinions, but it seems like a wasted effort to take offence at this cartoonish extra-terrestrial romp.
The Empire is peppered with knowing nods to Dumont’s previous work, including a fairly pointless double cameo by Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore as the clownish, bumbling detective duo from Li’l Quinquin (2014). The director has also called this film a “prequel” to his debut feature The Life of Jesus (1997), which sounds more like an elaborate joke on Star Wars mythology than a realistic link between two very different projects. That said, the same geographical setting features in many of his films, including the serial killer thriller Outside Satan (2011), which was initially titled The Empire. All of which opens up the intriguing possibility of a wider Dumont Cinematic Universe.
A key flaw in The Empire is its flimsy and undercooked narrative, setting up its grandiose good-vs-evil mythology but squeezing very little dramatic tension from it. Dumont’s broad humour is hit and miss, while his constant switching between goofy comedy and sci-fi action creates a very uneven tonal mix. The long-brewing clash between the Zeroes and Ones also proves strangely anticlimactic, fizzling out in a huge celestial fireworks display that looks terrific but makes very little sense, even in a film with no real commitment to internal logic.
In its favour, The Empire is an eye-catching feast of highly imaginative production design and world-class visual effects. The architectural spaceship creations are particularity inspired, with Beelzebub piloting a gargantuan city-sized ship crowned with a Palace of Versailles replica, while the Queen and her cohorts traverse the galaxies in a huge concrete skyscraper with a copy of the Parisian gothic cathedral Saint-Chapelle at its apex. For the grand interiors, Dumont and his team filmed inside various real cathedrals and palaces across Europe.
Other visual and sound design choices also impress, like the floating mass of shape-shifting black goo that Beelzebub inhabits before he takes on human form, which communicates in an alien language that sounds like avant-garde tone poetry. A rich soundtrack of classical pieces, mostly by J.S. Bach, lends a pleasingly ornate musical dimension to the film’s baroque aesthetic. There are too many inventive ideas and brilliant ingredients here to dismiss Dumont’s surreal space opera as a failure, but The Empire is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, an ambitious interstellar grand folly that never quite achieves lift-off.
Director, screenwriter: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Lyna Khoudri, Brandon Vlieghe, Anamaria Vartolomei, Camille Cottin, Fabrice Luchini, Julien Manier
Cinematography: David Chambille
Editing: Bruno Dumont, Desideria Rayner
Sound design: Jeremy Hassid, Romain Ozanne
Production design: Erwan Le Gal, Célia Marolleau, Peppie Biller
Costumes: Alexandra Charles, Carole Chollet
Producers: Jean Bréhat, Bertrand Faivre
Production company: Tessalit Productions (France)
World Sales: Memento International, Paris
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In French
110 minutes
