Nazis find an empty Louvre in compelling ‘Francofonia’

Alexandr Sokurov’s “Francofonia” occupies a middle ground between documentary and narrative feature. It’s the story of a real place, and two real men, told in a circular, meandering fashion.

That place is the Louvre museum, Paris’ glorious palace of art. The men are Jacques Jaujard, deputy head of the museum during World War II, and Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich, the Nazi-appointed overseer who arrived at the Louvre in 1940 only to find it empty. Jaujard, with his staff, had acted swiftly to whisk the museum’s treasures into hiding.

You can find a more straightforward telling of this story in the 2009 documentary “The Rape of Europa” (and, presumably, in the recent French television documentary about Jaujard, “Illustrious Yet Unknown”).

But Sokurov — who so beautifully plumbed the depths of Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in one glorious, 96-minute tracking shot in “Russian Ark” — had something more ambitious in mind. Blending archival footage, actor re-creations and special effects (sometimes all in the same shot), he simulates a sense of a specific place and time while crafting a sort of cinematic ode to art.

Scenes with actors playing Jaujard and Metternich are introduced with a narrator saying, “Were we to imagine how this took place, might it look like this?” But much of the film is quiet. Cameras float along the museum’s walls and hallways, lingering on empty frames or a woman dancing, weightlessly, through a gallery. A question is asked, early on: “Who would we be without museums?” Thanks in part to Jaujard, we don’t have to try to answer it.

MUSIC BOX FILMS) “Francofonia,” from director Alexandr Sokurov, reimagines some real WWII-era events that kept the treasures of the Louvre in Paris out of the hands of the marauding Nazis.