Bruno Dumont’s madcap parody of space sagas, set in provincial France, won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival 2024.
A hot day on a deserted beach in Côte d’Opale. The white dunes are glistening, the blue sea is covered in ripples, and the green bushes are quiet. A girl with a phone (Lyna Khoudri) is walking among the driftwood, fishing nets with plastic floats, and trash bins of various colors, when suddenly she kneels down in front of a baby in a window. The baby is the future lord of darkness, and the coastal village is in fact a battlefield for extra-terrestrial civilizations who call themselves the zeros and the ones.
The ones and the zeros live inside the bodies of the Côte d’Opale inhabitants and are engaged in a desperate struggle for the baby, kidnapping him from each other in turn. The ones are good and serve the blob of light that lives inside a space station in the form of the Sainte-Chapelle. The zeros are evil and obey the blot of darkness inside a space Versailles. In the human world, the Queen of the ones (Camille Cottin) has chosen to inhabit the body of the mayor, while Beelzebub (Fabrice Luchini), who heads the zeros, is a tour guide.
Bruno Dumont has produced films in very different genres (The Life of Jesus is a social drama, Camille Claudel 1915 a biopic, L’il Quinquin a murder mystery miniseries, and Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc a musical), but he has never adhered to established patterns, reinterpreting each genre and showing how environment, humans, and landscape can transform them.
Dumont has said that he likes space sagas for their big ideas, metaphysical elements, and transcendence. In limitless outer space, questions about eternity, good, and evil seem to arise naturally. The concepts of good and evil were part of Bruno Dumont’s professional life before the movies. Prior to becoming a screenwriter and director, he was a teacher of philosophy. In The Empire, good and evil are presented as abstract formations: blobs and blots. They fill the human body, but it is impossible to say for sure who is good and who is evil based on appearance and character alone. To underscore this idea, and at the same time pay tribute to the space saga tradition, Dumont announced that The Empire was a prequel to his debut film The Life of Jesus (1996), whose protagonist was a youth named Freddy. In The Empire, Freddy is the baby, the Chosen One, over whom the ones and the zeros are fighting a battle that no one ever wins.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
Empire
Director: Bruno Dumont
France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal. 110 min. 18+