While this musée-focussed doco does, like its predecessor, mix history and art with contemplative ease, its train-of-though musings aren’t contained in a single turn around the galleries. Instead, Sokurov draws in supplementary methods to flesh out his treatise on the cultural importance of art and its preservation in times of cultural upheaval.
In addition to his ramblings around the Louvre, conversing with Napoléon Bonaparte and republican symbol, Marianne, Sokurov also gets slightly more traditional. He pulls in some dramatic re-enactments to depict the collaboration between French public servant, Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and Count Franz Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), the German appointed by Hitler to oversee France’s art stocks, who conspired to keep the Louvre’s collection in France.
This bureaucratic bravery becomes a jumping off point for other trains of thought, including a return to the Hermitage to dwell on the damage inflicted by the soldiers barracked there during the war, and a Skype conversation the director himself is having with a tanker transporting containers full of art treasures as it is battered by a dramatic storm at sea.
The eclectic approach is effective, especially as Sokurov begins to overlay his images with anachronistic CGI. The film begins takes on a timelessness, with the importance of preserving art being stood side by side with the importance of avoiding other more conspicuous atrocities of war. There is a lot to unpack. And many of the stories are fascinating.
While it may not have the bravura of Russian Ark, it is still well worth the visit.
★★★☆
Trailer:
Francofonia screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.
You can check out other films from the festival here.
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