Cardinal Newman meets Paul Verhoeven: Bruno Dumont’s The Empire reviewed
From our UK edition
Bruno Dumont was always a bit off. Initially he was bundled in with the directors of the so-called 'New French Extremity', alongside Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noé (a label bearing all the hallmarks of lazy journalese – though all the filmmakers involved did have a predilection for past-the-watershed violence). But then neither did Dumont's output sit easily within social realism. He was not the straightforward heir to Bresson that many critics wanted him to be, despite the seeming austerity and reliance on non-actors in early films such as L’humanité (1999) and Flanders (2006).
