Gothic Spires from Outer Space

Picture, if you will, a version of the esoteric sci-fi masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” made after a cartoon anvil has landed on Stanley Kubrick’s head, causing animated canaries to circle overhead. The resulting film would probably look a lot like “L’Empire” (or “The Empire”), Berlin’s Silver Bear-winning French-language farce by filmmaker Bruno Dumont, who refracts the traditional space opera through a strange deconstructive prism.

As warring empires and prophecies descend upon an unassuming fishing town, aliens in human form prepare for an existential battle whose moral dimensions initially seem abstract and absurd. Rather than sleek, futuristic vessels, its spaceships take the form of gothic church spires and baroque palaces, Earth-bound designs that offer a clear-eyed view of the religious and political power that drives the warring factions up above.

Dumont, whose last film “France” satirized the French news media landscape, tips over the edge of madness with “L’Empire.” A send-up of the popular sci-fi tradition — beginning with “a galaxy far, far away” — it takes potshots at genre storytelling that draw from the real world while also eschewing it. The recent “Dune: Part Two” is one such example, a film influenced by Arab and Muslim traditions that uses orientalist window dressing to subvert the cliche of the “white savior.” In contrast, “L’Empire” poses no threat of appropriation to the people of the Opal Coast in Northern Northern France, which the film uses as a literal setting (rather than mere inspiration for one), and where Dumont also filmed the miniseries “Li’l Quinquin” and the movie “CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans.” Humdrum human drama unfolds between fisherman Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), the divorced father of a newborn baby, and local newcomer Line (Lyna Khoudri ), a sprightly young woman who is smitten with him. Soon, however, voices from a distant corner of the galaxy begin speaking through the townspeople — sometimes in digitally pitch-down gurgles; sometimes in reverse, like a scene from “Twin Peaks” — setting up a baby Hitler dilemma. 

Jony’s infant son, Freddy, it turns out, is a demonic force known as “the Wain,” and Jony is a knight belonging to intergalactic society known as “The Zeroes,” formless black blobs who steal human bodies and pilot an enormous ship resembling the Royal Palace of Caserta in Italy (modeled off the palace of Versailles), sprawling courtyards and all. Other townspeople, meanwhile, have been body-snatched by the Zeroes’ rivals, “The Ones” — these names are entirely nonsense — pillars of light attempting to eradicate the Wain from a mothership of their own, resembling the 13^th century Sainte-Chapelle in France.

From their gilded palaces in space — which the characters travel to via invisible portals around the Opal Coast; time is no hurdle — they speak in broad, poetic brush strokes about the fate of the universe and about conquering the Earth. However, Dumont intentionally contrasts this architectural and oral grandeur with wry mundanity. Jony’s mother, who looks after Freddy, seems unconcerned with these intergalactic goings on (if she’s even aware of them), while the local police engage in their own slapstick procedural subplot concerning the disappearance of Freddy’s mother. They’re none the wiser about the oncoming war.

Freddy, too, seems like a regular human baby; all we have to go off when it comes to his supposed evil or divinity is the word of others. Local swimmer Rudy (Julien Manier), for instance, is an envoy sent by the Ones to kidnap and kill the infant, but she ends up sidetracked when — in a raunchy subplot imbued with surprising emotional weight — she experiences human sexual desire for the first time. Is Freddy really the ultimate evil, or is Rudy’s mission so unimportant that it can be thwarted by lust?

Dumont’s perspective often appears warped. The Zeroes, for instance, bounce around comedically in human (and occasionally, inky, semi-human) form. Their emperor, named Beelzebub (Fabrice Luchini) is a prancing, wide-eyed megalomaniac who giddily bellows from the rooftops. But when Dumont’s camera returns from the cosmos and settles on the ground, the film’s politics are surprisingly lucid.

It all comes down to the movie’s use of architecture. Where films like “Dune” and “Star Wars” grant physical form to the abstract machinery of fascism — the colonizers in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” duology pilot spaceships with functional, brutalist designs; George Lucas’s Empire features soulless, mechanical Death Stars and Stay Destroyers — Dumont, on the other hand, turns literal symbols of power into machines. The vessels in “L’Empire” are existing French and Italian facades with religious and political significance, as though churches and palaces themselves were going to war, and unwitting civilians were caught in the crossfire.

At one point, a scout ship belonging to the Ones descends on an abandoned World War II bunker on the village’s outskirts, practically crushing this remnant of real-world atrocity. Out of the bunker’s entrance emerges the queen of this alien race, only she happens to take the form of the town’s mayor (Camille Cottin), and is forced to navigate concerned constituents while searching for the Wain. In Dumont’s acerbic view of military conflict, bureaucracy supersedes actual human suffering, as religious and political leadership place their boots on the necks of the common man, trampling even minor monuments built to commemorate their pain.

This dynamic of class violence even takes hold in Dumont’s casting. Actors like Luchini and Cottin, who play the human forms of each alien civilization’s formless leader, are seasoned veterans of the screen, and are dialed into the movie’s zany hyper-opera. Meanwhile, non-professional actors play the common folk on the ground, and deliver more naturalistic performances, as though they belong to an entirely different cinematic reality rooted in working-class concerns — before they’re inevitably forced to bear witness to (or participate in) destruction on a mind-bendingly enormous scale.

This combination of heightened genre storytelling and kitchen-sink realism produces most of the movie’s humor. But the dichotomy is meaningful, too, given the way Dumont unfurls his heightened alien opera just above the heads of his human characters, who are barely privy to the political mechanics at play, and likely to suffer the wrath of the Ones and Zeroes regardless. War and bloodshed always roll downhill, off the ornate ledges of ivory towers that will, in all likelihood, remain standing for centuries, if not eons.