‘The Empire’ Review: Bruno Dumont’s Artsy Space Spoof Is Beautifully Crafted and Certifiably Insane

Out of the many movies you could imagine emerging from the mind of French auteur Bruno Dumont, a Star Wars parody was probably somewhere at the bottom of the list.

And yet it’s been some time since the Cannes Grand Jury Prize laureate, who broke out in the late 90s with viscerally stylized, hard-hitting works of Gallic realism like The Life of Jesus and Humanity, has strayed far from his gritty roots towards a brand of accentuated arthouse satire.

His latest effort, the sci-fi farce The Empire (L’Empire), definitely fits the latter mold, although it’s loaded with enough VFX, light saber battles, spacecrafts and prophecies to give George Lucas a run for his money. That is, if Lucas decided to set the next Star Wars in a sleepy northern French city, used a local mechanic to play one of the leads and tossed in a few flagrant sex scenes, as well as the two bumbling cops from Li’l Quinquin (Dumont’s 2014 TV series that mocked self-serious police dramas like True Detective).

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In the press notes, the director claims The Empire is supposed to be a prequel to The Life of Jesus. That seems like a major stretch, although it does feature some of the same stunning landscapes and impressive widescreen photography, this time courtesy of DP David Chambille (who shot Dumont’s last few features). The difference here is that those landscapes are occasionally interrupted by the arrival of a giant floating ship that looks exactly like the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and houses a powerful interstellar Queen, appearing in the form of a hologram, played by Call My Agent’s Camille Cottin.

Are you a little thrown off? Well good, because Dumont isn’t trying to make anything real or believable. That’s pretty much been his modus operandi for a decade now, with his recent output consisting of two nutso Joan of Arc biopics, a goofy belle époque murder mystery called Slack Bay and the modern media satire France, which was the tamest of the bunch.

As with those films, the problem with The Empire is that it’s so over-the-top that it can often be a strain to sit through, unless you happen to share Dumont’s very offbeat sense of humor. Still, there are a few good gags in this one, plus plenty of trippy, artfully rendered VFX by Hugues Namur (Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom), who fuses historic French architecture, including the entire Chateau de Versailles, with futuristic technology to create his intergalactic fleet.

As for the plot, just like in Star Wars it involves forces of good and evil. Good is represented by the church (there’s always been a mystical side to Dumont’s work) and evil by the monarchy, with veteran Fabrice Luchini playing a Darth Vader-like figure called Belzébuth. The latter is dressed in a court jester’s costume that looks like a cast-off from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. In one scene, Luchini sits on the throne in his floating castle and watches what looks like a giant, gyrating butt dance around to a three-piece jazz band.

Back on Earth in the seaside city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, the epic battle centers around a child named Freddy, whom both good and evil believe is a future king called the Margat. His father, Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), has been raising him to service Belzébuth, and he’s aided by the very extraterrestrial-like newcomer Line (Lina Khoudri). But their plans are thwarted by Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei from Happening), a Princess Lea dressed in a bikini and accompanied by a rebel (Julien Manier) who goes around town decapitating people with his light sword.

The action is so deadpan absurd, and the acting so exaggerated when it’s not totally flat, that it seems to be lampooning the entire Star Wars franchise in its deliberate ineptness. By stripping those films down to the bare minimum of their plot points and inserting a few visual nods to other recent sci-fi hits, such as Dune and Arrival, Dumont reminds us that these billion-dollar Hollywood behemoths can be simplistic and even silly undertakings when you remove the expensive packaging they come in.

The Empire is light years away from the works of Lucasfilm, and yet when you take a step back and look past all the weird northern Frenchiness, it can feel pretty close at times. It’s too bad, then, that Dumont couldn’t make something more entertaining so that the satire would go down smoothly.

Like his other recent films, this one isn’t easy to sit through, though it’s definitely original and, per custom, impeccably made. You can accuse Dumont of many things, including testing the viewer’s patience, but at least he hasn’t sold out yet and gone over to the dark side.