L' Empire

In L’EMPIRE, the latest film by the ever lucid, ever irreverent Bruno Dumont, we see spaceships that resemble cathedrals and royal palaces, black holes, repeated sex scenes, a car accident worthy of a great chase sequence and beings from other galaxies, almost always accompanied by passages from the works of Bach. All this takes place in the same maritime town in Normandy where the filmmaker has set many of his tales, including the one that has a child Joan of Arc belting symphonic rock songs. In a couple of sequences, even Commander Van der Weyden and Lieutenant Carpenter from P’TIT QUINQUIN return try to work out what’s happening in the village. The overriding sense of delirium emerges from Dumont’s deliberately reductionist representations, in which some individuals embody absolute Good and others total Evil, as rival gangs of aliens that coexist with members of our species exchange blows: a childlike conception of the world not so very different from that which predominates in our present political arena. The political force of this gentle parody of the iconography and ideology of STAR WARS lies in the suggestion that this imaginary does not belong solely to fiction. (Roger Koza)

In the presence of Bruno Dumont.

On Saturday, October 26th 2024, there will be a talk with Bruno Dumont at the VIENNALE ZENTRALINO,. More information here!

Bruno Dumont: LA VIE DE JÉSUS (1998), L’HUMANITÉ (1999), TWENTYNINE PALMS (2003), FLANDRES (2006), HADEWIJCH (2009), HORS SATAN (2011), CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915 (2012), P’TIT QUINQUIN (2014), MA LOUTE (2016), JEANNETTE, L’ENFANCE DE JEANNE D’ARC (2017), COINCOIN ET LES Z’INHUMAINS (2018), JEANNE (2019), FRANCE (2021)