The heat is unbearable this summer, even on the Normandy coast. It’s no wonder that your brain, sizzling under the scorching sun, comes up with strange thoughts. For example, the fantastic idea of a galactic war being fought here, of all places, in a desolate town on the Opal Coast. For their final battle, the alien Imperial arch-enemies, the Ones and the Zeros, have slipped into the bodies of the villagers.
The ones are the sacred warriors, whose queen floats through the universe with an XXL Sainte-Chapelle as a spaceship and whose foot soldiers, the sexy Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) and the dumb Rudy (Julien Manner), complete laser sword training sessions in the withered front garden. The zeros, the profane warriors, are controlled from the baroque palace spaceship à la Versailles (including gardens!).
Fabrice Luchini, with his famous, wide-open eyes, plays the harlequinesque Beelzebub, who loves to have surreal triadic ballets performed in the state hall floating through space. And the devil’s son lives on earth as a babbling toddler: in front of the Margat – that’s what the children are called in the Boulonnais dialect according to director Bruno Dumont – they like to kneel down on the village street.
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As befits such genres, Freddy, the red-cheeked baby, is soon kidnapped from the care of Grandma by the Ones and immediately kidnapped back by the fatherly fisherman Jony (Brandon Vlieghe) – after Jony had consulted the rural Zeroes cavalry.
That’s it, says the baby, the devil’s spawn
Star war in the fishing village: If you like it really crazy, this wild genre mix, which premiered at the Berlinale and won the jury prize, is definitely recommended.
Bruno Dumont, enfant terrible of French auteur films, has created a kind of prequel to his social drama “La vie des Jésus” from 1997 with amateur actors from the region and a few professionals like Luchini. Space opera meets social realism, opulence meets laconicism: another kind of final battle. However, it is cinematic in nature.
The good guys aren’t better than the bad guys. The fact that all the boys in the village are of a simple mind and the girls are sexy, lightly dressed and always ready – it starts with a long shot of a dune landscape in which the naked Line (Lyna Khoudri) walks around very far away in order to get a streak-free tan The film was accused of sexism.
The actress Adèle Haenel, active in the French MeToo movement, canceled the shoot in advance out of criticism of director Dumont.
But who knows, maybe it’s just the aliens’ prejudices that make them appear as macho men and compliant women in “The Empire” when they barely take on human form. But the scenes in which Princess Jane and Knight Jony settle their feud via sexual acts on a barren field lack any lightness. And especially the humor that makes Dumont’s escapades in space so entertaining.
Laser sword assassinations, kidnapped devil spawn? The gendarmes in the village can’t fix it either: a cop film with a stupid group of cucumbers, another genre parody. The heat finally finishes everyone off.
Finally, a black hole swallows all the small combat UFOs of zeros and ones sent from the space stations, a gigantic vortex of the universe. This hypergalactic orgasm also absorbs all morality, all deeper and higher meaning. That’s it, says the baby.