When Nazis occupied the Louvre
Ben Stiller and director Shawn Levy have delivered three Nights at the Museum over the past decade. Not to be outdone, Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov presents an art-house followup to 2002’s Russian Ark, which imagined 200 years of history at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, crammed into a bravura, single-take 100 minutes.
Francofonia doesn’t duplicate the technical feat of that film, but it’s still a worthwhile expedition. The subject this time is the Louvre, second in size only to the Hermitage, and with triple the number of visitors annually.
The story skips back and forth through time. Various Napoleons keep invading the movie, which seems typical. But the focus is on the period from June 1940 through August 1944, when Nazi forces occupied the city and, by default, the museum. (Given the Louvre’s long history, the Reich’s forces were practically day trippers.)
The invading army kept Jacques Jaujard on as the titular head of the museum — he had already overseen the dispersal of much of its works to country estates and chateaux for safety — but paired him with Count Franz Wolff-Metternich, appointed by Hitler to oversee the collection.
Sokurov imagines meetings between the two men, who collaborated to keep artistic treasures away from Nazi collectors.
Francofonia is part history lesson, part philosophical ramble, as the filmmaker, acting as narrator, ponders the meaning of collected artworks. “Who needs France without the Louvre?” he asks. “Or Russia without the Hermitage? Who would we be without museums?”
The film includes an odd framing device, in which the director is also trying to talk to a container-ship commander (the unfortunately named Captain Dirk), transporting unspecified artistic treasures across rough seas. It’s an unnecessary distraction to the central story, which proves all on its own that if you have the Louvre, you have everything you need.