UPDATED: L’Empire (2024) features some nudity from Anamaria Vartolomei and Lyna Khoudri

UPDATE 2, with Defoe’s 4K clips (and captures).

The Hollywood Reporter summed up the film as follows:

Out of the many movies you could imagine emerging from the mind of French auteur Bruno Dumont, a Star Wars parody was probably somewhere at the bottom of the list.

True dat.

For one thing, a characteristic of the original Star Wars film is non-stop action, while Bruno’s films are the kind where the audience wonders, “I wonder if anything is ever going to happen?”

So it’s less like a parody of Star Wars and more like an intellectual exercise in “What if Star Wars had been directed by Tarkovsky?” This version of the Empire could easily have defeated the rebels by boring them to death.

Although, to be fair, L’Empire is still more interesting than The Phantom Menace.

In one of the nude scenes, Lyna Khoudri is so far from the camera that she may be dressed. It’s 54 seconds of a woman turning slowly around. You have to squint to find her. (On thumbnail size, you can’t even tell that anything is moving!) If you’re still awake after watching that, you may be wondering what happened next. More of the same. The camera focused on her head as she put on a towel. Then the camera pulled back to show her body, now wrapped in a towel, as she wandered around for another 35 seconds. (Wandering around aimlessly is a Dumont trademark.)

Even if you disregard the glacial pacing, you probably realize that parody is not the ideal genre for a pretentious man with no sense of humor.

Twenty years ago, I hated Dumont’s Twentynine Palms so much that I ripped it up minute-by-minute, and I concluded:

Dumont is clueless, and didn’t even bother to think up events which might have some possibility of occurring. The film is tedious and disjointed for all but the last 20 minutes. That final segment isn’t boring, but it is filled with behavior which is totally unmotivated and illogical. 29P makes such legendary pointless films as Zabriskie Point (which this film resembles in certain ways) seem to be as incisive and eloquent as Henry V.

On the other hand, many, many critics disagreed. Some felt that it was a lesson in the tedium and randomness of the universe and other such high-falutin’ existential concepts. I guess they must be right, because this film is a part of the universe, and it is certainly random and tedious.

The late Tuna, my former colleague, was even less forgiving in his appraisal:

To me, this was one of the stupidest films I have ever seen. Evidently Dumont was hoping to elicit an emotional response. My only response was wishing it would end. The best part of this film is that I will never need to see it again. Despite some critics, who proved that they can be as pretentious and clueless as Dumont, this is utter crap. No plot, no characterization, no motivation for anything that happens, and most of what happens is boring. I don’t see how anyone who is honest with himself can claim to enjoy this film.

Twentynine Palms really stunk, but at least it had some good nudity. The nudity in L’Empire never rises to that level, although Anamaria Vartolomei’s scene is ah-ight.

Defoe’s original 1080hd film clips.