L'Empire

Dumont seems to want to work his way through, in his own way, some of the popular cinematic genres: having recently taken care of musicals, he decides to move on to STAR WARS – that is, outer space fantasy adventure about a saviour and set in a Manichaean universe – but Dumont relocates all of this to his preferred setting and strips away most but not all of the decorative trappings. For Lucas, the complicating factor, to the extent that there is one, lies in the kinship relations between enemies; for Dumont, the complication is what lies behind those kinship relations, and what is absolutely excluded from STAR WARS – sex. And more specifically: the relationship between its carnal and spiritual components. The moral of the story being that, once all that nonsense is stripped away, we’re left with the ordinary messiness of human relations – from out of which every possibility of extraordinariness emerges. Despite all of that, however, the interest in this generic renovation only goes so far…although I did quite like the black hole.