FRANCOFONIA (Aleksandr Sokurov). Subtitled. 87 minutes. Opens Friday (April 8). See listing. Rating: NNN
Much more than just a Louvre gift shop souvenir, Alexander Sokurov’s latest art-related film is a dense, visually inventive essay about the legendary Paris museum.
As in his best-known work, the bravura single-take Russian Ark, about the Hermitage, Sokurov plays an unseen narrator who this time muses about the Louvre, covering its long history and commenting on everything from the spoils of war to how museums contribute to civilization.
Some fey touches, like having actors portraying Napoleon and Marianne, the symbol of the French republic, cavort through the gallery’s many halls, don’t always pay off. But Sokurov’s focus on what happened to the -museum during the German occupation is fascinating stuff.
And his series of imagined scenes with the museum’s deputy head during that time, Jacques Jaujard, and Count Franz Wolff-Metternich, appointed by Hitler to seize the art for Germany, ends in a terrific postmodern sequence that is worth waiting for.
