L’Empire by Brun Dumont
Starting June 13, Bruno Dumont’s L’Empire is in theaters, distributed by AcademyTwo.
Landing from space in Italian theaters is the opening film of BFF42, presented as an Italian premiere, and already winner of the Silver Bear – Jury Prize at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.
An eccentric and deep movie, in search of human dynamics between the opposite poles of a binary logic: the countryside, the space; the ancient, the contemporary; the good, the evil.
Behind the appearance of the mundane daily life of a fishing village on the Opal Coast, the epic parallel life of knights from interplanetary kingdoms emerges. Rival clans are engaged in a fierce and bloody battle following the announcement of the birth of Margat, the resurrected, purple and lurid Prince, the Beast of the End of Times, who is here on the Coast, the son of a young couple already separated, as is usual in a working-class neighborhood.
A film to laugh, but also to reflect, directed by a surprising authorial gaze.
Dumont offers a cinema capable of splitting all critical judgment through a look at the world that captures it “as it is” (to quote his words during the masterclass at BFF42). His vision is structural, privileging the relationship between bodies and spaces, and in his films he has used it to narrate the banality of evil and the mystery of reality through everyday life; as well as love as hope and as joy, violence and isolation, sex and death, guilt and mysticism.
With L’Empire, we witness the comic reversal of these themes, in the wake of the more recent outcomes of his artistic journey. Dumont seeks a form of sincere tenderness, of that “soft light” latent in every human being in the void of contemporaneity.
En passant, if after being at the cinema you feel like delving deeper, on Friday 14 at 01:30 a.m., on Rai3, at Fuori Orario – cose (mai) viste, you can watch in TV premiere the Talk on Cinema given by Bruno Dumont during BFF42. If you miss it, no problem, you can catch it later on RaiPlay, in the Fuori Orario strip, along with his films Coincoin et les z’inhumains and Jeannette.
