cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/25226920

Picture, if you will, a version of the esoteric sci-fi masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” made after a cartoon anvil has landed on Stanley Kubrick’s head, causing animated canaries to circle overhead. The resulting film would probably look a lot like “L’Empire” (or “The Empire”), Berlin’s Silver Bear-winning French-language farce by filmmaker Bruno Dumont, who refracts the traditional space opera through a strange deconstructive prism.

As warring empires and prophecies descend upon an unassuming fishing town, aliens in human form prepare for an existential battle whose moral dimensions initially seem abstract and absurd. Rather than sleek, futuristic vessels, its spaceships take the form of gothic church spires and baroque palaces, Earth-bound designs that offer a clear-eyed view of the religious and political power that drives the warring factions up above.

Dumont, whose last film “France” satirized the French news media landscape, tips over the edge of madness with “L’Empire.” A send-up of the popular sci-fi tradition — beginning with “a galaxy far, far away” — it takes potshots at genre storytelling that draw from the real world while also eschewing it.