Spoils

Francofonia

Crit

Like director Alexsandr Sokurov's earlier Russian Ark, set in the Hermitage, this nominal documentary, set largely in the Louvre, is a strange and unique and indescribable film. Let me try to describe it.

A framing narrative features the filmmaker Skyping with the captain (named Kirk--an early joke seems to suggest that a phone interlocutor has misheard the name as a famous rhyming name of a captain, and a later companion joke has Sokurov addressing a Russian author as Mister Chekhov) of a ship apparently carrying artworks across treacherous seas. What are we to make of that frame? No idea--that art is always in jeopardy, no less from nature than from humankind?

The bigger narrative involves the undeclared collaboration between Jacques Jaujard, charged with protecting the Louvre's artworks from the ravages of war, and Count Metternich, charged with overseeing the Third Reich's appropriation of the art of conquered lands.

Oh, and Napoléon wanders in and out of the picture, along with Marianne, the French personification of liberté, egalité, et fraternité.

As I said, indescribable.