Francofonia Reviews

To be honest, I actually have no idea how I actually ended up watching this movie. Indeed, I watch tons of movies for some really lame reasons but, in this case, I seriously couldn’t remember why actually did record this movie about a year ago. I mean, it wasn’t a really critical success and it didn’t win any prestigious prize. Was it because of the title? My guess is because it was directed by Aleksandr Sokurov whose work I’m not familiar with but the guy seems to have a decent reputation. Anyway, this movie definitely had some potential but I still struggled to connect with the damned thing. You might think that it was a documentary but it was much more original than that. Indeed, in my opinion, it was some kind of collage combining so many things together. I mean, you had some voice-over and dialogues in 4 different languages (Russian, French, English, German) even by Sokurov himself, you had some reproduction footage of WWII, some archive footage, some more or less random footage of modern Paris and a lot of footage of Le Louvres and of the Art displayed at Le Louvres (probably the main attraction of this flick). There were some interesting ideas about Art, history and our relationship with Art through the last 4 centuries but, to be honest, the whole thing was still too random for my taste. Furthermore, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it really mattered that Jacques Jaujard (the director of Le Louvres during WWII) and Franz Wolff-Metternich (the Nazi officer who was responsible for the conservation of the French art collections) did get along fairly well and managed to protect all these Artistic items while millions were dying in the meantime. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.