Jean Vigo never got to direct Peter Sellers; he never got to drop Inspector Clouseau into the flat, endless fields of the Côte d'Opale. Nor will David Lynch get to collaborate with Bresson or Eric Rohmer. That’s for the birds. Regretfully.
Less regretfully (in fact, very happily) we can — putting these wilted-stilted comparisons aside — live with the films of Bruno Dumont. Right now, in fact, we can live with l’Empire (2024); his cosmonautic space-operatic and properly bananas new film. It’s really good.
But “new” isn’t the right descriptor here, because l’Empire is something of a continuation-culmination; a kinda-maybe-sequel to other of his Côte d'Opale TV shows and films, all of which — the po-faced cop comedies (Li'l Quinquin [2014]), the tragic cop tragedies (Humanite [1999]), the satanic visitations (Hors Satan [2011]), the ascetic-theological agonies (Hadewijch [2009]), all of them — mingle in the same plane of existence.
We might coin-coin it (a Dumontian joke, haha) “the Dumont extended l'univers” — a sequence of films and TV shows that share characters, archetypes, themes, landscapes. For George MacBeth they are a “moral universe”. They share a formal register; with various and different DOPs (Yves Cape, David Chambille, Guillaume Deffontaines) helping him to realize (an increasingly poppy and sun-saturated) wideness of frame; it can feel like watching the world through a medieval visor. So, his frames are wide and his subjects can be very small, but sometimes, cutting against that width — here’s where the Vigo thing crops up, the Besson thing — we see them in portrait, closer up, with more of a Flemish than a Dutch angle, eyes cast skyward, mouths slack. We see hands and gesturing parts-of-bodies; Dumont studies them. He’s slow, particularly when he’s inviting us to drink in the immanence of the Northern countryside. They (his films) also share a (misleading) passivity. We look; he looks. Dumont is careful not to cut-to-the-quick; is suspicious of expressionistic editing. He is saying: look, wait — something miraculous or indescribable might happen. Maybe it won’t. It’s in these spaces (these looking-waiting spaces) that he reveals something sudden and miraculous: a shotgun’s deafening blast, a body tumbling; a moment of levitation in an allotment; a kid in a Spiderman costume scrambling (totally against gravity) up a wall. This doesn’t need a cut, the knife-work of montage: he lets it happen. The eye fills in the blanks.
Dumont has also — in many of his films — cast locals-as-not-actually-yokals. He’s the Pedro Costa of the Dover-to-Calais ferry. This can add a grainy gravity to his bare-bones passion plays, where the “innocent” (non-professional actors) play out his stories about innocence’s “end”, thinking here about The Life of Jesus (1997), Hadewijch (2009), and Hors Satan (2011), which are all, ultimately, about innocence — and experience. Properly Blakean stuff.
Because, in Dumont’s l’univers, youth — not age — is the real locus of wisdom; the local kids know what’s really going down, remaining (relatively) un-gormless in the face of the inexplicable “events” that befall them (growing up, discovering bodies, encountering extraterrestrials — typical provincial-upbringing stuff). This is something really all of these films share, and it’s something Dumont would more explicitly burden himself with in figuring out what (after Dreyer and Bresson) could be done with the life, and death, of Joan of Arc (this is Jeannette: the childhood of Joan of Arc [2017] and Joan of Arc [2019]). Squaring up to his stylistic forebears, he went the way of costumed pop-opera. Naturellement.
Right, but there was a point in Dumont’s career when he seemed settled among the ranks of the New French Extremity — that uncoordinated amalgam-tendency which, in James Quandt’s scathing, po-prim invective, is a gross “succumbing” to “shock tactics” — a “grandiose form of passivity”. But, in his not-late-nor-early style he has — with a sense of real panache — become lighter, a kind of meta-comedian. The terror, the horror (the horror!) is still there; lingering. But now he leavens it with a graceful dose of bonhomie. Maybe he got bored of violence; how emptily transgressive and hopeless it can seem. Maybe all that despair does something to you.
But his stakes are still the same: good vs evil, the possibility of grace, revenge, the desire for forgiveness. It’s all still there. But, with L’Empire, he’s putting his silly-goose hat firmly on. It has funny ears; he’s smiling.
Lynch-Vigo-Sellers-Rohmer. I said all that earlier. It’s basically accurate, so far as comparisons go. There are others. But Dumont is really his own man. He used to make industrial films for factories and businesses. Then he taught philosophy. Then he started making films. Dumont is his own man because, even if l’Empire does certain Lynchy things (for example), he has different concerns. It’s more French (obviously), but I mean that seriously: Dumont doesn’t seem to gravitate to the coast of Northern France because it’s a stand-in for “everywhere/anywhere” else (Twin Peaks as “the American dream turned nightmare”), but because it is distinctively itself. He knows it; he grew up there. It is uniquely itself.
He does “slow cinema”. But what does that really mean? He’s asking us to be patient, to give patience. It’s an act of generosity toward the community he has, like the churchy spaceships of l’Empire (we’ll get to that), sort of parachuted among: half human (that is: a local) and half alien (that is: a filmmaker). He’s aware of his own dislocation from his subject, and his own entanglement with it. Here, men and women are the playthings of gods, aliens, angels, devils, murderers – the whole lot. But they’re also the playthings of directors. Dumont grapples with his own compromise.
Which brings us to l’Empire, where two warring, intergalactic “races” vie for the souls of humankind. I think it’s probably quite in hock to Milton (just as it piles its all-you-can-eat plate with the Wizard of Oz, Alphaville and Twin Peaks, et al). Dumont serves up a very, very red herring which we can calculatedly sidestep (both “sides” seem mutually destructive, suspicious; bearing duplicitous intentions). They’re kidnapping and counter-kidnapping a baby who is supposed to be the harbinger of doom, or salvation; it’s not clear which. It doesn’t really matter. The police (the familiar gendarme funny-boys of the captain and his [now more confident] partner, Carpentier, who we’ve seen in earlier films) are as unobservant and bumbling as ever. But, Dumont is generous toward them; how can they “solve” a crime of such existential magnitude? How can they arrest evil itself? It’s the same realization that detective Pharaon de Winter reached in l’humanite, Dumont’s sublimely ambivalent police procedural from 1999. Evil will knock you to the floor.
Putting aside the Manichean machinations of l'Empire’s intergalactic warfare (gooey black blobs fighting pillars of light, both of which assume fleshy human form with a various sense of impishness, awkwardness and sang-froid), Dumont humanizes this struggle in the trysting-twisting between Jane and Jony, the Lancelots of their respective (good and evil) commanders. They hiss, flirt, and eventually fuck; entangling themselves in the messy consequences of what it means to assume human form — their alien-angel subjectivities now subject to the all-so-human vagaries of tears, lust, and love. In this way, they become chaotically human, and unable to sublimate, suppress or generally better manage the rollercoaster of what it means to live and be alive. This is a good narrative focus for Dumont, because it means he can ground his Big Ideas Film in a handful of earth rather than the entirety of space and time. While cathedrals battle in space above, what matters are the tears that trouble Jane’s face — and Jony’s twitching cheek as he struggles to maintain his “beast”-like (as he calls it) indifference.
Put another way, while Dumont gives us what is ostensibly a space opera, he’s really — sly, this — serving up a chamber piece. Look: something miraculous is about to happen. Be patient.
If you liked this newsletter then please consider liking, sharing or subscribing. It’s lonely here.