It is increasingly weird to recall that for a while, French director Bruno Dumont was the kind of filmmaker who reminded you, often forcibly and somewhat against your will, that the word “auteur” contains most of the letters of “austere.” “The Empire,” another of the director’s proudly off-kilter comedies that pitches the bumbling denizens of a small French village into a vast, sinister conspiracy extending far beyond their foreshortened horizons, hovers several light years — and two janky light sabers — away from austerity. Unfortunately, though, the air out there is also a little thin on hilarity, with the film’s one-gag setup becoming stretched to the point that it doesn’t even matter that it’s a pretty good gag.
The humor, as ever with the Dumont of “Li’l Quinquin” and “Slack Bay,” derives largely from the collision of the grandiose with the drolly mundane. This time out, harking back to, but confusingly not quite reprising, the premise of his 2018 TV miniseries “Coincoin and the Extra-Humans” the same coastal village featured in “Quinquin” and “Coincoin” is the inexplicable locus for an alien invasion. In fact the alien race, known as the 0s (zeroes), whose mothership is an echoingly empty replication of the palace at Versailles (or perhaps Versailles is imagined to be its replica here) has been infiltrating the village for some time now, in a process sadly not as scatologically inspired as in “Coincoin” where possessed humans give birth to their own alien clones by farting them out through their rear ends. Indeed, one can’t help but feel we’ve been a little cheated by the comparatively tame and tasteful method (never directly visualized, or even clearly outlined) by which these alien entities colonize and eventually take over their human hosts.
The 0s’ sentinel has been assimilated into the body of local lobster fisherman Jony, drily played by first-timer Brandon Vlieghe, who from some angles can look runty and rustic and from others like a dashing Han Solo-esque hero, albeit one with nefarious rather than gallantly roguish intentions. Jony has fathered a Messiah-like infant, known as The Wain, who is destined to lead the 0s to global domination. It would appear to be curtains for humanity — in both senses, as the 0s not only want to take over the planet, they are explicitly bent on evil. Guess that makes sense, with a leader unsubtly named Beelzebub (a prancing, preening Fabrice Luchini).
Thankfully, our beleaguered species also has a protector alien race supervising us, essentially the angelic counterparts to the 0s’ demonic posse. The 1s are led on Earth by the comely, light-saber-wielding Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) and her padawan Rudy (Julien Manier, also in Dumont’s “Joan of Arc”). And from their spaceship, which is shaped like the Gothic Saint-Chapelle in Paris, their Queen (Camille Cottin of “Call My Agent”) issues far more benevolent diktats. Except, of course, as they pertain to the 0s who are guarding The Wain, whom Rudy and Jane are encouraged to summarily execute by vvwom-vvwomming laser-sword decapitation.
When Rudy thus dispatches The Wain’s birth mother, two things result. Jony gets a new mate in the (again, comely) form of new arrival Line (Lyna Khoudri) — all the female leads in Dumont’s films are gorgeous while many of the men seem cast for their deviation from classically accepted male beauty standards — which causes friction when Jony can’t suppress his attraction to his opposite number, Jane. And secondly, in the course of the investigation into the mysterious death, the stars of “Quinquin” and “Coincoin,” Captain Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and his loyal sidekick Carpentier (Philippe Jore) show up.
To fans of the Van der Weyden character, who for the uninitiated is what would happen if you put Tati, Chaplin, Clouseau and Columbo into a tumble dryer on high spin, it’s a little like burying the lede, and then giving the lede far too little to do. Van der Weyden and Carpentier are cruelly underused here muscled out by a lot of mythmaking mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t do anything substantial with all the opposing forces that Dumont’s scrappy screenplay references. Despite fun trappings — the crosswired sexual encounters, the talking blobs of CG goop, the horseback knights who are a chorus of aging local yokels delivering maguffin speeches in deliciously deadpan style — the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness. Given all that, it cannot but disappoint when all that really happens is they kind of cancel each other out, in a way that may be supposed to evoke a Sartrean existentialism, or a early-Dumont-ian nihilism but really just feels a little glib. Maybe the cosmic joke that is our place in the universe just ain’t that funny anymore.
Source Agencies
