The Empire is a manifesto opposing the most corrupt, childish film genre.
Every Star Wars fan who has reached the age of consent should see Bruno Dumont’s The Empire. It’s a bizarre yet movingly humane satire that exposes the philosophical deficiencies of the movie genre that dominates global film culture.
That’s right, the bad faith of sci-fi action movies from Star Wars to everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets challenged by Dumont’s unique examination of mankind’s troubled faith. He uses the Manichean precepts of good and evil that movie hacks from George Lucas to the Russo brothers have trivialized. (Zack Snyder gets a half-pass. More on that below.)
Dumont’s contemporary-set story takes place in anno Domini (a.d.), not the Common Era (c.e.) according to secular fashion. In The Empire’s frame, residents of a coastal village in northern France — gruff, virile fisherman Jony (Brandon Vlieghe) and teenage tease Line (Lyna Khoudri) — reveal their oddball allegiance to extraterrestrial invaders. The Christian referents in their aspirations (peasants who renounce traditional morality; space travelers who attain evangelical heights) are so stark that they ignite Manichean opposites: the struggle between a world of light that is good and spiritual, and a world of darkness that is evil, material, and carnal.
None of this will seem strange if you’ve seen Dumont’s La vie de Jésus, Humanité, Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, Hors Satan, Hadewijch, or Slack Bay, but it should shake the assumptions of sci-fi fanatics accustomed to inane moralistic fantasies — especially franchises that rip off everything from the Creation (The Phantom Menace) to the Rapture (Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame).
The Empire’s earthly locale (cinematographer David Chambille provides clean vistas and harsh, purging sunlight) works as a counterpoint to its extraterrestrial sci-fi opposite (a cathedral-style mother ship where leaders of the Empire reside descends from a yonic crevice in the outer space darkness). The rural characters, beneath the sway of the hovering Empire, represent human rivalry. Jony and Line compete like gang members for affection and domination against bawdy Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) and Rudy (Julien Manier), who wield laser swords and decapitate their enemies. Jane realizes, “Everyone here is a balance of good and evil. Our battle is in their hearts.”
Dumont observes both the underclass and the otherworldly — elevating the analogies found in speculative fiction. But here, he adds the behavioral complexities of demented and defective personalities. His predilection for casting abnormal nonprofessionals alongside professional actors gives real-life complexity to his tale. He uses sci-fi to make sense of contradictory real-world subculture experiences — say, Rebel Moon and Bikeriders — in groups identified as 1s and 0s. (“While the 0s corrupt humans, we the 1s improve and raise them up,” says the Empire.)
Yet Dumont’s satirical approach to outlandish cinematic world-building also connects to history and philosophical hermeneutic tradition. Ordinary Jony is father to the Empire’s messiah (an infant known as Freddy or “the Wain”). Imagine mixing the Nativity with Star Wars so that figures from one narrative are transmogrified into another. This divine/human analogy, recalling La vie de Jésus, is a splendidly esoteric conceit. Sunday school and Saturday matinée combined.
These earthly/cosmic contrasts are visually amazing. Supernal landscapes and the gigantic, palatial mother ship — with its combination of colonial, gothic, and neoclassical architecture — take viewers low and high, from the spiritual enigmas of Humanité to its carnal reality. (“Your human condition is not a dilemma! It is providential, the only form possible for our empire!” challenges Fabrice Luchini as the mother ship’s jester, Belzébuth.) Mankind’s dilemma comes across powerfully in the erotic conflict between Jony and Jane. “We may be enemies, but the bodies we’ve taken aren’t,” she tells him. “Don’t you feel the soul that’s there?” These are full-fledged emotional characterizations.
It’s in the genuine spectacle of their conflicting passions that Dumont suggests the mature, sci-fi mythology of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon and then surpasses it. In search of a good-vs.-evil parable, Dumont also goes headlong into all the religious implications that George Lucas avoided. The result is a topsy-turvy movie that is also spiritually profound in ways that the Marvel and DC franchises don’t dare but that became abstruse and chaotic in Snyder’s many Rebel Moon iterations. In Dumont’s eccentric way, The Empire forces the sci-fi genre to represent Western culture’s deepest mysteries. It’s like a Classic Comics version of a Robert Bresson movie with Spaceballs thrown in — a manifesto opposing the most corrupt and childish film genre. Dumont invents his own cosmology based on human sin and aspiration, the body and spirit, and mystery. This eccentric artist has earned his folly and respect.