The Empire (Bruno Dumont, 2024).
The recent release of Bruno Dumont’s The Empire (2024), an absurdist space opera focalized around the inhabitants of a small fishing village in northern France, confirms that the past decade inaugurated a distinct period in the French director’s career. With their unblinking treatment of spiritual subject matter, Dumont’s first two features, La Vie de Jésus (1997) and L’humanité (1999), led many to declare him an heir to Robert Bresson. And while the outsized violence of his next film, Twentynine Palms (2003), drew worries that Dumont might be succumbing to a “tendency to the willfully transgressive,” as James Quandt wrote in his polemic against the New French Extremity, his subsequent work undercut such charges: Flanders (2006) and Hadewijch (2009), both unsparing but more restrained, returned to more familiar terrain, with the latter even featuring a direct homage to the swamp-water conclusion of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967). The appearance of Li’l Quinquin in 2014, however, was something else entirely. A 200-minute made-for-TV miniseries, it saw Dumont reworking L’humanité’s savage spectacle into slapstick seriality—a lateral move that he followed with not one but two Joan of Arc musicals (Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, 2017, and Joan of Arc, 2019); a Quinquin sequel involving an Invasion of the Body Snatchers–esque sci-fi subplot (Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, 2018); a distorted descendant of Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936) whose plein air proceedings literalize the injunction to “eat the rich” (Slack Bay, 2016); and a film about a celebrity journalist that doubles as a portrait study of Léa Seydoux (France, 2021). Trade reports describe Dumont’s next outing as “a Romeo and Juliet–style love story set one summer on the French Riviera” featuring rival cliff-jumping gangs.
While some might see these recent films as an unprecedented shift in direction, Dumont’s more perceptive commentators have recognized that they represent a concerted development of prior concerns: in particular, the aesthetic dissonance that arises from rendering overtly spiritual quandaries with an earthy, even brute, physicality. But even these prior preoccupations are a matter for debate. In accounting for his style and subject matter, not all critics agree, for example, that Bresson was or is a useful point of reference. This recent run affords a useful vantage from which to reconsider Dumont’s cinema as a whole. Reflecting on his career in 2019, Dumont observed that his latest films are contiguous with his earlier work: “There’s a thread that links them, but at the same time, there’s been an evolution.” Faced with the zany improbability of Dumont’s past decade, the present challenge is to articulate just what this evolution comprises.
Top: Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont, 2018). Bottom: Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton, 1928).
The most immediate revelation of this post-2014 period is that Dumont is as indebted to a tradition of silent slapstick comedy as he is to one of religious filmmaking; to Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel & Hardy as much as Rossellini, Pasolini, and Bresson. Coincoin and the Extra-Humans opens with—and later repeats—the famous gag in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), in which the façade of a house falls atop Keaton’s hapless protagonist, who remains standing in the rectangle of its open window. The detective and assistant figures who recur throughout Dumont’s filmography, from L’humanité all the way to The Empire, are likewise recognizable descendants of Laurel & Hardy. Like that pair, the bushy-browed inspector and his rodent-like assistant from Quinquin and Coincoin, most prominently, continually struggle with a world that is unyielding, thick, intransigent, weighty—just so damn material. If the representative image of a Laurel & Hardy film is, as B. Kite writes, a close-up of a tack on the floor that is, inevitably, stepped on (as in Leave ’Em Laughing, 1928), then the signal image of Coincoin would be the viscous, tar-like space-goo that falls to earth in sudden globs all over the town, and which threatens to fall, too, on our hapless protagonists. Inevitably, repeatedly, it does.
Dumont’s cinema has long displayed a taste for the elemental, expressed mainly in his enduring fascination with landscape, particularly those vistas of northern France from which he hails. The surging shores in L’humanité, the Flemish fields of Flanders, the verdant marshes of Hadewijch: These images, rendered with the extraordinary physicality of his camera style and CinemaScope framing, serve to defamiliarize the world, investing his films with a sense of the sublime. But while Dumont has not eschewed such magisterial heft in his recent work, he has increasingly chosen to complement it with gags that display a simple fascination with all the things that bodies—both human and nonhuman—are capable of. Quinquin and Coincoin are, among other things, exhaustive compendiums of textures and noises: the imposing outline of a looming windmill, the mechanical whir of a harvester gliding across a field at nighttime, the tinkling and clanking of liturgical vessels during Sunday service, the resounding splat of the sticky space-goo, not to mention the extended farting noise that persists as cloned doubles are “birthed” from the bodies of the townspeople in the latter film. These sensations are not what one usually thinks of as sublime—at least not in its conventionally Romantic conception. They are even somewhat puerile. But as in the films of Jacques Tati, during which one becomes attuned to the surprising sonority of bodies and the unique ways that they occupy and move through space, there is a similar wonder at the sheer facticity of the world—an amazement and delight that this sound should come with this sight.
Top: L’il Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, 2014). Bottom: Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967).
Having explicated these comic determinants, Dumont confirms what some may have sensed from the very start: that his work is not so much stoic as simply deadpan. Or, better, that these two sensibilities may not be so far apart after all. For all of his early films’ interest in the Zola-esque bête humaine, as one character puts it in L’il Quinquin, Dumont’s scene construction has always suggested the precision of a vaudeville act. Looking for clues to the brutal murder and rape of an eleven-year-old girl in L’humanité, police superintendent Pharaon De Winter notices that the crime scene sits a field apart from a train track and thinks to ask a pair of elderly English travelers whether they perhaps saw anyone from the window of their high-speed train, the cavernous modern setting of the Lille Europe rail station and the comedy of miscommunication recalling Tati’s Playtime (1967). But if Dumont’s cinema is usefully situated within comic coordinates, this raises a further question: If the great comedians embody different modes of being in their distinct ways of relating to the physical world, then what significance can we draw from the singular way Dumont renders the material stuff of his films?
One way of approaching this question is to consider Dumont’s views on acting and performance. At least one reason for the repeated comparisons to Bresson is Dumont’s casting of nonprofessionals. Bresson’s rationale for his own procedure, as set out in his Notes on Cinematography, is well known: No actors, no parts, no staging, “but the use of working models, taken from life.”1 Despite its polemical thrust against theatrical convention, Bresson’s position was nonetheless complex. Recognizing that simply to drain faces of expression was not enough, that to do so would be an artificial imposition, he sought “involuntarily expressive models (not wilfully inexpressive ones).”2 In A Man Escaped (1956), for example, the spareness of Bresson’s style harmonizes with the limitations of its prison-set story: The restrained expressivity of the film’s characters is a function of their restricted situation. But even Bresson did not manage to entirely avoid charges of willful inexpressiveness across his career. He worked harder than almost anyone to oppose the conventions of drama, but his position was just that: an opposition. To conceive of his “models” against established theatrical or dramatic conventions is still to confirm a certain dependence. Dumont’s signal difference is that he does not position himself against theater or drama—does not conceive of a naturalistic baseline against which one might measure the rightness (or wrongness) of a performance. Indeed, he denies that there could be such a baseline. What his cinema rejects is the very idea of setting up a norm against which behavioral propriety or plausibility would be measured.
L’humanité (Bruno Dumont, 1999).
From his earlier period, L’humanité remains the first explicit, and still the most forceful, instance of this rejection. Throughout the film, Emmanuel Schotté’s Pharaon de Winter ambles about stiffly, his large eyes vacant, far-off, raising suspicions that he may be something of a dullard. As one townsperson remarks, as Pharaon responds to a strike demonstration, “You’re too damn stupid to be a cop.” He acts in ways incongruous to the propriety of a regular townsperson, to be sure, let alone the detective work of a police superintendent. Tasked with watching a suspect at the police station, he sits in front of the man, brings their foreheads together, starts running his nose across the man’s face, then abruptly gets up and leaves. Near the film’s end, after finding out that another man, his friend, was responsible for the child’s brutal murder, he brings the killer’s heaving, sobbing body toward him in an embrace and kisses him on the mouth. These are, we might think, disproportionate and improper responses. But disproportionate and improper in relation to what? On what basis could one discern anything like a proper, proportionate response to such a horrifying discovery? That Pharaon at one point levitates above a community garden, recalling Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) as well as the closing of Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979), may encourage us to see him as a kind of holy fool. Given Dumont’s refusal to establish a naturalistic norm of behavioral propriety, however, this event reads more like a parody of such a view—an indictment of those who can only make sense of Pharaon by measuring him against an assumed naturalism, those who can only naturalize his behavior by thinking of him as literally supernatural. For Dumont, naturalism is in this respect a kind of escapism. And if it is tempting to read his films as parables or fables, this is because it is often easier to think of his characters as not being of our world than to reckon with the conditions of their presence within it.
Dumont’s cinema is therefore not so much anti-naturalistic as post-naturalistic, and it is this feature that binds together his oeuvre. Across his films, Dumont has repeatedly portrayed the inhabitants of the French regions around his hometown of Bailleul, not shying away from casting for physical and even mental difference. For this tendency, he has been charged with condescending to, and looking down on, his characters. But the real condescension for Dumont would lie in the tendencies of the “naturalistic European cinema” which he sees as dominant today—a provincialism tied to cultural centers and their productions, which seek to artificially limit the range of acceptable performance. (One thinks of Marguerite Duras’s praise of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Othon, 1970: “All accents are allowed except that of the Comédie Française, that accent of camouflaged meaning, of authority.”) What distinguishes his films, then as now, is their concerted effort to expand the behavioral field of cinema as a whole.
Slack Bay (Bruno Dumont, 2016).
In Slack Bay, a family of inbred, upper-class cityfolk descend upon the eponymous ocean inlet, where there lives a local family of mussel-gatherers who supplement their income by carrying vacationers back and forth across the bay—and who also happen to be cannibals. But more than its plot particulars, the appeal of the film derives from how Dumont vigorously combines the over-the-top antics of his professionals (Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) with the physicality of his nonprofessional actors (led by Brandon Lavieville). The exhilarating result is a film structured around the familiar oppositions of city and country, rich and poor, but where it is not so easy to dismiss the figures on either side as mere caricature. Likewise, the unique frisson of Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc is found in the way it reinvigorates the Joan of Arc story by placing lines from French poet Charles Péguy’s plays—Jeanne d’Arc (1897) and Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910)—into the mouths of untrained children. And that’s even before one factors in the headbanging, dabbing, and techno-metal score by French musician Igorrr. One might object that such portrayals are obviously inappropriate, perhaps even blasphemous, when it comes to a figure such as Joan of Arc. But such objections assume that one knows what the manifestation of a spiritual vision ought to look like—and it is this assumption that Dumont’s understanding of performance subverts.
Jeannette’s sequel, Joan of Arc, meanwhile, adapts the latter portions of Péguy’s 1897 play and attempts to return to cinematic modes that may have been lost in the transition to sound. Not only does the film employ onscreen text to signal transitions in time and space; it also opts for a jerky, even crude, narrative progression more in keeping with early twentieth-century passion plays and the silent era than with the découpage of a sound film. But here again it is Dumont’s approach to performance that stands out. Speaking of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) to Cahiers in 1957, Bresson remarked, “I understand that in his time, his film launched a minor revolution, but now all I can see in the actors is those dreadful contortions of the face that make me want to flee.”3 One way to see Dumont’s own Joan of Arc film is as an effort to defend Dreyer from Bresson. Like Slack Bay and Jeannette, Joan of Arc includes no shortage of eccentric gestures, declamatory extravagances, and antic performances—precisely those “dreadful contortions” which Bresson eschews in his own The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962). But in Dumont’s extended trial sequences, which maintain a grave intensity despite the film’s apparently exaggerated modes of performance, we see how the acting registers of Dumont’s zany comedies are just as capable of rendering the intense questioning, clerical showmanship, and spiritual parries of the historical trial transcript. Contra Bresson, Dumont demonstrates that no performance style has any special claim to rendering the truth of an event—no special access to what Gilles Deleuze called the “mystery of the present” in the work of Péguy, or what Péguy himself termed the “internal.”4
Top: Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, 2019). Bottom: France (Bruno Dumont, 2021).
The conviction that no performance register has any privilege over another achieves concerted expression in France—one of the great films of the decade—albeit by different, even opposed, means. Joan of Arc defamiliarizes its story by casting a child to play France’s most iconic patron saint: ten-year-old Lise Leplat Prudhomme portrays Jeanne aged seventeen to nineteen. (For reference, Renée Jeanne Falconetti was 35 in Dreyer’s Passion.) France centers on a celebrity journalist, France de Meurs, the very image of opportunism and inauthenticity, a role for which Dumont enlists Léa Seydoux, a high-wattage movie star. In terms of performance, the latter may accordingly strike us as more mannered, more artificial, less “authentic” than the former. Remarkably, however, both films place viewers in comparable positions, forced to reckon with the assumptions on which our judgments of authenticity and truth depend.
Narratively, much of France comprises a series of incidents in which France finds herself embroiled: a minor car accident; her betrayal by another opportunistic journalist; a war-zone excursion in North Africa; a Mediterranean refugee crossing; a major car accident in which she loses her husband and child; and, finally, a brutal crime in the vein of L’humanité. Formally, though, the film is effectively an extended Kuleshov experiment in which the viewer is presented with a series of events—more or less personal, more or less tragic—cut against tear-stained close-ups of Seydoux’s France, as if to ask us in every instance whether this time we take her tears to be true. And what we come to understand, confronted not with the supposed innocence of the nonprofessional actor but an apparent fullness of thespian display, is that both judgments rely on a tacit naturalism—the setting up of a “natural” norm of behavior against which the propriety of all performance is assessed. We realize that there is ultimately no privileged standard by which to confirm the truth of a performance. France explicitly thematizes this toward the film’s end, when Seydoux’s celebrity journalist returns to the terrain of L’humanité, traveling to northern France to interview the wife of a convicted child rapist. If Dumont’s earlier reliance on nonprofessional actors created the impression that he saw this procedure as a means of guaranteeing “authenticity,” this scene, as well as his increasingly frequent incorporation of professional actors since Juliette Binoche appeared in Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), suggests otherwise. It affirms his conviction that there is ultimately no measure by which to judge a Pharaon de Winter as any more or less “authentic” than a France de Meurs.
The Empire (Bruno Dumont, 2024).
In The Empire, which Dumont has described as a prequel to La Vie de Jésus, these various strands of his cinema come together. He has said that the film conveys his interest in “what cinema means, writ large”: not just “naturalistic European cinema” but also “American cinema, specifically science fiction and the space opera.” Dumont’s response to the former we have already seen—and once again, the film returns to the terrain of northern France, specifically to a small fishing village on the Opal Coast countryside. If a consideration of “American cinema” (read: Hollywood blockbusters) offers something new to Dumont’s cinema, however, it is not simply because The Empire includes all manner of CGI spectacle: a spacecraft fashioned after various French cathedrals, intergalactic battles, lightsaber duels, and so on. Rather, it is because the literally cosmic scale of a Manichean, Star Wars–like struggle between good and evil allows him to explicate his interest in forces that one could call mystical, while reasserting that such forces must be, in some manner, embodied. As the silent comics remind us: There’s no getting away from bodies.
Throughout The Empire, agents of light and darkness “possess” various townspeople with the respective purposes of killing and protecting an infant child who is said to be the embodiment of all evil. But if these characters’ interactions do not, in the end, venture far afield from those seen in Quinquin or La Vie de Jésus, this is because an avatar of the James Cameron sort, a body as an empty vessel for an already determinate agency, is for Dumont simply a nonstarter. Indeed, much of the fascination of The Empire comes from watching these extraterrestrial agents of good and evil having to navigate the bare and wondrous fact of having a body, with all the limitations but also the possibilities (the urges, temptations, and anticipations) that such a condition implies. The sex scenes between Anamaria Vartolomei and Brandon Vlieghe, who play characters on opposing sides of the conflict, are of interest for how they refract the cosmic battle through a sense of carnal discovery. It is likewise startling when, amidst a battle for custody of the one prophesied to be the embodiment of all evil, the action grinds to a halt to linger on a close-up of the infant in question, who, whatever else he may turn out to be, looks no different from any other two-year-old.
The incorporation of CGI spectacle, so weightlessly deployed in Hollywood blockbuster cinema, might initially seem incongruous in Dumont’s film-world. But such scenes, mostly located in outer space, are set precisely against the physicality and gravity with which Dumont invests the Opal Coast countryside, understanding that an extended sequence of a boat being winched onto a trailer, or a close-up of a man running his hands through the mane of a white horse, can be just as, if not more forceful than any cosmic vista. There is no clearer illustration of this contrast than the treatment of sound during the film’s climax, in which a full-scale interstellar space battle culminates in a vortex that opens up between outer space and the small northern town, threatening to suck up most everything in sight. On the side of the space opera, the rupture is rendered silently, and with the exception of various characters’ screams (which sound oddly like sex noises), we hear only music; but on the side of the Opal Coast town, we are granted the full sonority of the external world, which here amounts to the aural sensations of a threatening storm passing through town. When the vortex closes, the intergalactic battle vanishes into nothingness, its final outcome elided, in place of which we are offered the sight of an automobile falling from the sky, accompanied by the satisfyingly familiar sounds of crumpling metal and car parts flying every which way. The scene is an object lesson if there ever was one, leaving the viewer in the way that Dumont’s cinema so often does: with a renewed sense of the weight of the world and its sticky, stubborn intransigence, but also a renewed wonder at what bodies can do.
- Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, tr. Jonathan Griffin (Urizen Books, 1977), 1. ↩
- Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, 39. ↩
- Robert Bresson, Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983, ed. Mylène Bresson, tr. Anna Moschovakis (New York Review Books, 2016), 54. ↩
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 106. ↩