Butler's Cinema Scene

“FRANCOFONIA” My rating: B  

88 minutes | No MPAA rating

Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov’s obsession with museums as repositories of our collective culture has already given us one near-masterpiece, “Russian Ark.” In that 2002 mind-blowing fantasia several centuries of history unfold on the grounds and in various galleries of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, all of it captured in a single impossible 2-hour-18-minute tracking shot.

In “Francofonia” Sokurov turns his attention to the Louvre in Paris.

The film is technically a documentary…but a doc of a singularly personal sort. We see filmmaker Sokurov (or, more accurately, the back of his head) sitting at his computer in a workroom.  From time to time he video chats with the captain of a freighter in the North Atlantic who is carrying a precious cargo of priceless art through a harrowing storm at sea. (Is this real footage or staged?)

The soundtrack consists mostly of Sokurov’s voiceover, a steady stream of consciousness that skips from century to century and topic to topic.

Through a treasure trove of old photos and newsreels he tells us the Louvre’s history. His camera often moves in close so that we’re nose to nose with the painted faces looking down from the gallery walls.  At other times his camera floats like a disembodied ghost through the corridors and treasure-filled rooms.

Lady Liberte and Napoleon…checking out the Louvre

The bulk of “Francofonia” is devoted to the World War II years and two men who pretty much saved the Louvre’s great masterworks from Nazi desecration.

Jacque Juajard was the director of France’s museums at the start of the war.  Franz Wolff-Metternich was a German nobleman and officer in charge of the Reich’s efforts to preserve classical culture.

Weird thing is, Wolf-Metternich actually defied his superior’s orders to scarf up all of France’s great masterpieces and ship them back to Germany. He formed an unusual partnership with Juajard, who fearing that Paris might be bombed already had relocated most of the Louvre’s greatest treasures to various isolated chauteaus in the countryside.

In the years after the war the two men would be honored for their preservation of French culture.

Jaujard and Wolff-Metternich are portrayed in pastel-colored re-enactments by actors Louis-Do de Lencquesaing and Benjamin Utzerathand.

“Francofonia” is a technical tour de force, a deeply fascinating history lesson, and ultimately a weirdly touching tale of two men — ostensibly enemies — who without ever really discussing it tacitly agreed to preserve French culture from the barbarian hordes.

Less a conventional documentary than an intensely personal cinematic essay, “Francofonia” defies convention at every turn. It’s not for movie wusses. But it casts a spell all its own.

| Robert W. Butler