Critics reviews

Though there are dramatised sequences with actors playing the central parts, this is foremost an essay film that attempts (and largely succeeds) in placing this tale of administrative derring do into a wider cultural context. Like much of Sokoruv's work, this film looks to the ugly corners of life and history and locates profound bitter, beauty.

Compared to [Sokurov's] masterpiece Russian Ark (2002), which distilled three centuries of Russian history into one spectacular, uninterrupted take of the Russian State Hermitage Museum, this is disjointed and dreary, its power diluted by Sokurov's constant, self-important narration. In one scene Napoleon (Vincent Nemeth) glowers at the Mona Lisa and declares "It's me!" Unfortunately, Sokurov's point—that ego is the enemy of art and society—is diminished by the film's own pretentiousness.

[Sokurov] has put nothing less than his whole self into this film. If you watch it, he will demand nothing less of you. And it's worth the effort, because his theme this time is the cruelty of greatness itself: the terrifying, age-old alliance of art and power, and the crushing distance of both from the lives of those who serve them.

These are beautiful artworks, the camera seems to say, but also fragile survivors. But despite these moments of lucid expression, Francofonia is scatterbrained, occasionally leaden (see: anything involving the Marianne figure), frequently redundant, crammed with false starts and dead ends, wrapped in gauzy greenish murk. Sokurov speaks in rhetorical questions and glib riddles.

Most of the film, while handsome to look at, doesn't rise above the level of obviousness. The most interesting sections involve re-enacted encounters between the Louvre's director, who remained during the Nazi occupation, and the aristocratic German officer who refused to loot France's art treasures, though he knew where they were hidden. A film that focused on those two alone might have made it easier to concentrate.

Francofonia is an essay film, maybe a lyric essay film: ambitious and personal, concise and complex, insightful and at times limited by ponderousness. Sokurov's old-fashioned faith in cultural stalwarts can read not just as conservative, but naïve... But this naïvete prompts questions the more world-weary might scorn to ask, and Francofonia‘s scope broadens.

As in Sokurov's Russian Ark, in which the labyrinthine hallways of the Hermitage Museum were transformed into a sort of runway for nearly 300 years of Russian history, Francofonia treats the Louvre as a complicated, all-encompassing metaphor for (European) civilization itself. "What is France without the Louvre?" Sokurov poses via voiceover, and in his customarily grave lilting cadence. "Who would we be without museums?

Genuine archival footage mingles with digitally processed re-enactments that flicker and alter aspect ratio moment-to-moment, evincing the uncanny feeling of getting lost in a museum. While at its heart FRANCOFONIA is an unrepentant history lesson and Sokurov seems content to teach, the work has moments that cut across eras and reveal the true cost of art.

Images from the Second World War overlap with images from the First, while different media—photographs, paintings, and actors—beautifully take on a similar aura within the cinematic space of the filmed Louvre.

In his formal mashing-up on one hand and his schizophrenic essayistic musings on the other, the Sokurov of Francofonia recalls no one so much as latter-day Godard, who in 2010's Film Socialisme similarly endeavored to put Europe on a boat. But while the Gallic New Waver works upon his films like a kind of trickster god, Sokurov feels more like a bemused older relative, using the viewer as trusted confidant and sounding board for his passions and worries.

The uncompromising, enveloping mood and technique of Sokurov's films already gives them a vivid authorial presence, but here especially the extensive use of the director's voiceover makes it feel like a journal of opinions, observations, and dream fragments. The product is an at times misshapen assemblage of his musings.

Alexander Sokurov's lyrical, multi-layered meditation on what has formed our ideas of Europe defies categorisation. Best thought of as a "docu-fantasia" or "cinema-poem", it's a vivid example of the way in which the borders between fiction and documentary are blurring.