“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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 