‘We’re all Responsible’: Two New Films Grapple with Amorality

Somehow, a ‘Star Wars’ (1977–ongoing) parody seems perfectly in line with the rest of Bruno Dumont’s oeuvre. The filmmaker behind a dire drama about evil punks (The Life of Jesus, 1997), a meditative crime tragedy (Humanité, 1999) and a Joan of Arc duology (Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, 2017, and Joan of Arc, 2019) has long been investigating the Manichaeism undergirding the nearly 50-year-old franchise’s extraterrestrial battles. Dumont’s latest, The Empire (2024), transports this narrative to the north of France, specifically the Opal Coast countryside, where he has kept a studio for several decades and has shot many of his films. For those who have seen Dumont’s work, the scenario of The Empire is immediately recognizable: large swaths of empty rural land and sparsely populated neighbourhoods, beautifully shot here by David Chambille; a soundtrack of clucks and moos; non-professional acting with wide fluctuations in tone and emotion. We’ve seen this before, and we’ve seen Dumont transform it before, though it’s nevertheless surprising when the phone-addicted Zoomer Line (Lyna Khoudri) meets fisherman Jony (played by local mechanic Brandon Vlieghe), and they begin communicating in some distorted Lynchian variation of French. It’s thus that Dumont invites us to his space opera: we learn about an intergalactic battle between 0s (the Sith, or bad guys) and 1s (the Jedis, or good guys), being played out by proxy avatars on planet Earth.

In a 2021 interview for Screen Slate, Dumont – who taught philosophy before becoming a filmmaker – articulated an ethos that in retrospect informs The Empire: ‘Cinema is the real way to embrace the totality of the world and to not intellectualize it. Because in cinema, there’s a body there. The mind has difficulty grasping the coincidence of opposites, for example. You can’t think that good coexists with evil. Intellectually, that’s impossible.’ The Empire exacerbates this tension, teasing it out and rendering absurd that apparent incapacity. The film has all the trappings of a ‘Star Wars’ movie. A ‘chosen one’ – though, in a twist, an embodiment of evil – has come to Earth in the form of an infant named Freddy (or ‘The Wain’), and the 0s, represented by Line, Jony (Freddy’s father) and an absurdly madcap leader named Belzebuth (zanily performed by Fabrice Luchini), are tasked with protecting the child. Their adversaries, the 1s, represented by bikini-clad Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei), the hirsute and leonine Rudy (another non-actor Julien Manier) and their celestial Queen (Camille Cottin), strive to eliminate the child (read: decapitate it with a lightsabre) while also preventing the 0s from colonizing the souls of humanity.

However, this is still a Dumont film, he reminds us, by populating the film with unperturbed non-professional locals around whom the battle is taking place, even going so far as to bring back the bumbling detectives Carpentier (Philippe Jore) and Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) from his earlier films Li’l Quinquin (2014) and Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (2018). The action is all quite repetitive and slow-moving, the conversation trite and seemingly of little consequence and the characters all bumbling and ineffectual. Even the spaceships are terrestrial – near-replicas of the Saint-Chappelle in Paris and the Palace of Versailles – and metaphorically a little on the nose. And if I were to summarize the plot: the Wain gets tossed back and forth between the 0s and 1s until they all get sucked up into a black hole. It all literally goes nowhere; The Empire ends (disappointingly for this viewer who thought Humanité and L’il Quinquin to be great films) without much of a compass – moral or otherwise. I found those films to address an ambiguous and arbitrary moral binary in compelling and humanistic ways, leaning on his characters to offer some sort of third path that can’t be instrumentalized by, say, the church and state; and while I’d be okay if ‘Star Wars’ were sucked into a black hole, I can’t say I appreciated Dumont throwing his film into one.

Conversely, I was especially pleased when I watched Alain Guiraudie’s latest Misericordia (2024), a philosophical police procedural, a lot more in line with Humanité than The Empire ever could be – a sentiment repeated by other critics calling Misericordia ‘Dumontian’. Guiraudie’s film – named after the Latin word for ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’, often used by the Catholic Church – follows the mysterious and boyish Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), who returns to his hometown in southwestern France (not unlike one of Dumont’s settings) supposedly for the funeral of his former mentor, the village’s baker Jean-Pierre. It’s a quiet, forested town, where the largely working-class locals spend their spare time hunting for morels in lush nature. There, he reconnects with Jean Pierre’s widow Marie (Catherine Frot), their son and Jérémie’s childhood friend Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and others including the local priest, Father Griseul (excellently and tenderly performed by Jacques Develay). Vincent’s jealousy over his old friend’s supposed advances towards his mother – it’s suggested that in fact Jérémie had an affair with his father, about which Marie knew, and which endeared Jérémie to her – leads to them scuffling in the forest, resulting in Vincent’s quietly shocking murder. The film unfolds as Jérémie gets caught up in his own web of lies around the whereabouts of Vincent – whom he had buried at the scene of the crime, where in a masterfully executed metaphor morels flourish over the decomposing corpse – and, in an apparent divergence tactic, ingratiates himself to the locals via seduction, drawing comparisons to The Visitor in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968).

The sentiment of the film’s title is reserved for the priest, who nevertheless subverts its ecclesiastical connotations by undermining the morality games that a person like Dumont accuses the church of playing. Following Vincent’s murder, Misericordia becomes largely about Jérémie’s feelings of guilt, which increase the more his alibi unwinds. A striking scene, a little more than midway through, shows the protagonist entering Father Griseul’s church. Encountering him there, the Father requests that Jérémie take his confession – a wonderfully surprising role reversal that is also the film’s most tender scene – in which he reveals knowing of Jérémie’s guilt. What follows is an expansive conversation on the role of punishment and restitution. ‘You think there’s a point in punishing murderers?’ Griseul asks. ‘I think it’s difficult to bear that secret alone,’ replies his interlocutor, to which the priest clarifies: ‘Not alone.’ It’s misericordia (mercy/compassion) founded in an expansive and unrequited love – both platonic and romantic – underlying Griseul’s compelling humanism.

He becomes a sort-of guardian angel figure to Jérémie following this confession, helping to clear up the latter’s alibi (telling the police that the two were sleeping together on the night of Vincent’s disappearance) and later digging up Vincent’s corpse as the gendarmes begin closing in. There’s a scene towards the end that presents the film’s confident, though challenging, moral stance. Overwhelmed by the guilt of his actions, and the tightening police trail, Jérémie is about to jump from a cliff when he’s stopped by Griseul, to whom he passionately asks: ‘You can square your conscience?’ And the Father replies: ‘Everyone can.’ This sequel to the confession scene expands out to consider guilt within the context of human suffering and catastrophe, with Griseul remarking: ‘We’re all responsible, even if it’s far from home.’ It’s an exchange that calls to mind that great Samuel Beckett line: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ (The Unnameable, 1953). It’s a challenging position to hold – Dumont was maybe onto something saying that ‘You can’t think that good coexists with evil.’ It becomes an overwhelming weight to bear.

I think back to Dumont’s Humanité and its doe-eyed and gentle-hearted detective Pharaon de Winter who is investigating the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. As the pressure of the investigation builds, Pharaon, unable to bear it, runs to a field and lets out a blood-curdling scream, as if to say, ‘I’ll go on.’ Better that than a black hole.

_{Main image: Alain Guiraudie, Misericordia, 2024, film still}