The Empire (Bruno Dumont, 2024)
Bruno Dumont's satirical space opera is good, actually
Despite its mixed reception, The Empire is a natural extension of the ideas Bruno Dumont explored in his 2021 hit, France. Where France explored the idea of contemporary existence as a media-dictated performance through the lens of one inscrutable photojournalist, The Empire is a broader, relatively minor affair, riffing on Star Wars-esque tentpoles to depict the current digital landscape as a brain-rotting force.
The Empire is premised on an intergalactic war between the Ones and the Zeroes, celestial armies who are possessing humans and fighting light-saber battles. Their primary warzone is a coastal French town where a Zero baby, Wain, has been deemed a chosen one, destined to bring about a coming apocalypse. With its absurdist plotting and obvious symbolism (e.g. the Zeroes and Ones’ spaceships are modeled after French cathedrals and palaces), The Empire initially seems to state the obvious, that mainstream cinema creates false binaries and propagates traditional ideologies, but the actual effect Dumont creates is much stranger, and the critique more nuanced.
A lot of this has to do with the experience of watching a space opera set in Dumont-world, complete with the recognizable physiognomies of his non-actors and the tactility of his landscapes. By creating a sharp divide between physical setting and the digital effects, Dumont turns his film’s human drama and space opera into a case of literal disembodiment. When The Empire takes place on Earth, much of it feels like watching LARPers, resulting in the best skewering I’ve seen of our current generation of YA-obsessed consumption as well as a wider commentary on the conspiracy nuts and fanatics that have proliferated over the past decade.
The perpetrator of this degradation goes beyond the Star Wars and Dunes of the world. In this small town, the bright colors of a phone screen or an SUV are just as strange as a digital Versailles touching down on Earth. Before the Zeroes and Ones are even introduced, The Empire opens with a shot of a young woman looking for phone signal. As Dumont uses extreme long shots of characters traversing the rural landscape throughout the film, his gaze is implicated with both the fantastical possessors and the real-world satellites that surveil our every move. Dumont even treats his cinema as a franchise with the inclusion of Van Der Wuyden and Carpentier, the two inept police officers from the few episodes I saw of Li’l Quinquin. This self-indicting move is the clearest link between The Empire and France, which presented a world where every digital image, including the film’s own, was a site of ambiguous authenticity. The inanity of the space opera is less Dumont’s satirical target than a symptom of our dystopian historical moment.
This provides a hypothesis for one of The Empire's ostensible contradictions, that of the dissonance between the ironic narrative delivery and the evident care that went into its creation. From its molding of French monuments into warships to the Lynchian orbs that govern the Zeroes and Ones, The Empire boasts truly impressive effects, easily on par with the blockbusters it’s referencing. Similarly, the characterizations of the possessed humans is surprisingly affectionate. The film’s primary relationship between a Zero and a One is depicted with tender physicality. Their two sex scenes, shot in erotic close ups of hands and tongues, are genuinely beautiful, giving lines that are sort of laughable (“we may be enemies but the bodies we’ve taken aren’t”) appreciable pathos. Although these characters can’t be saved from the void that awaits them, the reality of their bodies provides a glimmer of hope.
The Empire is distributed by Kino Lorber and is available on VOD. Images courtesy of Kino Lorber.