There are a handful of recurring themes in the cinema of Bruno Dumont: the marginalized and disenfranchised, living in the countryside of France. The sheer ridiculousness of human experience. Its wretchedness. Martyrdom. The failure of (organized, Christian) religion. The essence, the root causes of evil. The possibility of salvation – if any. Or rather, the struggle for salvation. Yet, his impossibly nihilistic and bleak cinema is the funniest, most hilarious one in contemporary European cinema – with such a razor-sharp and unpredictable sense of absurdist humor that even his closest followers can never really anticipate what his next gag or joke might be. (For example: an enormous ass dancing to a soft jazz version of Bach’s Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh (Come, sweet death, come, blessed rest), in the hall of an evil overlord?) All of the above – and more – applies to the third installment of his “Quinquin” cycle: L’Empire (The Empire), one of the most highly anticipated films at this year’s edition of the Berlinale.

Before the premiere, many publications described L’Empire as a parody of Star Wars – however, beyond a select few direct references, many of them used sparingly until the film’s dramatic finale (such as lightsabers, enormous galactic space stations, or flying battleships), one shouldn’t expect a new iteration of Mel Brooks’ 1987 Spaceballs. As in the case of P’tit Quinquin (2014) and Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (2018), which borrowed elements from murder mysteries and, respectively, B-series alien invasion films, genre is not precisely at the forefront. For Dumont, the purpose is not (just) to subvert the genre, as much as it is to create a dissonant, destabilizing experience for spectators by de-familiarizing them with two notions that are otherwise very familiar, to the point of predictability: the countryside, on the one hand, and cinematic (narrative) conventions, on the other. Rather than genre subversion, this is genre disruption: using humor and caricature to explosive ends, Dumont mines these common places to extract a much deeper and complex discourse on human (im)morality than most films would ever even dare to attempt.

L’Empire – which is Dumont’ most massive production to date, with 5 co-producing countries – starts as a small-town drama about a young fisherman, Jony (Brandon Vlieghe, who might be construed as a new, older iteration of Quinquin), who shares custody of his baby boy, Fredy, with his bitter former wife. (To quote his 2021 interview with Films in Frame, “When I am filming people from the countryside, I am very close to nature, but, in fact, I am closer to human nature.”) However, as he and his new love interest, Line (Lyna Khoudri), start to speak in tongues about the arrival of an Antichrist-like entity, and his ex is decapitated by a slacker Jedi knight named Rudy, it becomes quickly apparent that the sleepy village on the seaside has fallen prey to a malign influence, and has become the stage for the ultimate fight between the galactic forces of Good and Bad.

It’s the oldest conflict in the book, which Dumont stages as a confrontation between the equally incompetent Ones – a force standing for civilization, equality, and solidarity, surviving on a Notre Dame-esque spaceship, represented by a knight named Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) – and the Zeroes (nefarious and evil, piloting a Versailles-shaped version of the Death Star). Beyond face value, the two camps are thinly-veiled critiques of Catholicism, on the one hand (not unlike in Dumont’s Jeannette / Jeanne diptych), and of the mindset that is a direct result of imperialism and colonialism, on the other (not just French – see the Portuguese tiles that decorate the battleships of the Zeroes). It proves a case a bit too difficult for commander Van de Weyden and his trusty side-kick, Lieutenant Carpentier, the protagonists of the series’ two previous entries, to solve – although they do feature in prominent cameos, played by the same Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore.

I must confess that I entered the screening of L’Empire feeling a little bit of disquiet – given the viral interview given by French actress Adèle Haenel almost two years ago, in which she announced her decision to quit the film industry: pinpointing it on her experience of working on a nascent version of the film. Some elements of her statement seem to refer to an earlier iteration of the script: I found no jokes about “cancel culture” in the film, whatsoever; one could speculate that her quitting and subsequent remarks might’ve led to amendments. However, the two antagonistic main female characters, Line and Jane, are indeed highly sexualized, primarily existing as a vehicle for the pulsions and desires of Jony, especially within the film’s second half (save for the grand finale, where all of this melts together into a delirious, meta-physical battle over the very soul of humanity). It’s hard not to see why a very principled and outspoken feminist such as Haenel would be deeply troubled by this – and not for naught.

Maybe this is the limit of Dumont’s disruptive approach – the jokes and gags he creates are composed of so many layers (which can violently clash with each other) that sometimes they might not end up connecting with viewers, or even land as tone-deaf. This is not to say that one should defend (or ignore) the gratuitous nudity and sexual caricatures in the film, not at all – they weigh down and cheapen what is otherwise one of the great masterpieces of his entire career. However, I don’t agree with Haenel’s statement that behind the film’s “funny façade, it was a dark, sexist and racist world that was defended” – since L’Empire does not defend any single bit of the world that it portrays: it’s a world that, not unlike ours, is wholly absurd, small-minded, stifling, outright miserable at times and stupid (see the scene in which a possessed Jony claims that his race is disappearing – a parodic jab at the great replacement ideology embraced by the National Rally). Rather, the only thing it defends is our impulse to laugh about it all – which might just be the closest thing we have (empirically speaking) to a divine, transcendental experience, as Dumont seems to suggest.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.