L'Empire

Fabrice Luchini

Bruno Dumont's L'Empire is a pleasantly lunatic vision, meshing Dumont's beloved northern France settings with a science fiction parody. Two dueling extraterrestial clans seek to renew their legacy by assuming a human form and propagating in the Côte d'Opale. Mythic themes are parodied and burlesqued: rival dynasties, star-crossed lovers, and an anointed child preordained to lead the next generation. Unlike the George Lucas efforts it mocks, L'Empire offers genuine spasms of violence and sex. The aliens races are equally eager to decapitate with their light sabres and to copulate in their newly acquired human flesh. The cheekily comic couplings occur in nature, on land or sea, in landscapes worthy of Courbet.  

The two warring clans are monikered the 0s and the 1s, the building blocks of our digital age. The 0s have a spaceship that looks like Versailles. They have a patriarch (Fabrice Luchini) and resemble, in their non-human forms, merde emojis without  Gallic charm. The1s have a mother ship that resembles Reims Cathedral and resemble rays of light. Dumont is parodying the French dualism that has dominated it national discourse even before Descartes posited a mind/body split. French discourse and French humor have never really caught on in the States and L'Empire opened here with barely a ripple.

Dumont contains this film within his own cinematic universe of northern France seen before in his mini-series L'il Quinquin. As in that project, he strikes gold with youthful performers. Based on her previous work, I expected  a fierce and committed performance from Anamaria Vartolomei, but Dumont gets equally compelling work from newcomer Brandon Vileghe. Only Fabrice Luchini overdoes it, but what can you expect when Luchini is playing a character named Belzébuth.