Francofonia

Synopsis:  A meditation on the vagaries of cultural history with a particular focus on the efforts of Louvre museum director Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and German officer Count Franz Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) to preserve its mission during WWII.

Alexander Sukarov had an international art-house in 2002 with Russian Ark, a film set in St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum that took us on a journey through Russian history and that, remarkably, was shot in a single continuous 96 minute take. Barring the single take, Francofonia is effectively a reworking of that film. A familiar strategy, no doubt, but to his credit Sokurov wrests something new out of the project, giving visual form to his belle-lettrist ruminations on a loosely associated grab-bag of ideas about cultural memory and the vital role of the great museums in preserving it.

Don’t be fooled by the synopsis, Francofonia is not a dramatic fictionalization of WWII history like George Clooney's The Monuments Men (2012) but rather a freewheeling, Barthesian essay written and voiced by the director on the Louvre as a monument, an idea, and, so to say, an ark. There are a few historical recreations depicting encounters between the French museum director and the Nazi officer charged with the job of administering The Fuhrer’s latest acquisition (as it transpired  the paintings had been removed to chateaux in the countryside) but for most part Sukarov uses a combination of archival footage, still photography and the occasional fantasy sequence to illustrate his ruminative narration.

Much as he did in Russian Ark, Sukarov makes uses of iconic signifiers to lend allure to his meditations – Napoleon and Hitler on the one hand, Tolstoy and Chekov on the other - on a swag of ideas centered on the museum, at once a mausoleum of the past and a vital repository of cultural life. And intermittently he engages in brief video chats with the captain of a container ship carrying artworks across the storm-tossed Northern Atlantic, a rather unsubtle metaphor for man’s feeble attempts to defeat time, Nature and his own destructiveness, as well as, in the most impactful section of the film, briefly taking us to The Hermitage in Leningrad where the Nazis were far less  respectful of the Russian people and their cultural inheritance.

There are some stimulating ideas in Francofonia but appropriate to its essay form it is up to the viewer to take from it, or in other words, bring to it, what he or she will. It is a style of film-making that worked a treat with Russian Ark but in the absence of historical pageantry or tour-de-force technique, this is unlikely to gain as enthusiastic a reception.

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