Francofonia

Aleksandr Sokurov looks at the Louvre between 1940 and 1944. Two men sit at the centre: the museum's director Jacques Jaujard and the German officer responsible for protecting collections, Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich. Their collaboration was not chosen, and its result was that the Louvre's treasures were never shipped to Germany. This is not a straight history film. Sokurov narrates in his own voice, Napoleon and Marianne wander the empty galleries, and the story keeps cutting to a video call with a ship's captain hauling crates of art through a storm. The same question is asked from both ends: what exactly is saved when a painting is saved. The difficulty is plain. It is closer to an essay than a narrative, thin on incident and dense with thought. There is also an unsettled edge, since the care Europe took over its own art sits next to what Europe took from elsewhere, and the film only circles that. It screened in competition at Venice in 2015. Who it is for: viewers who like the cinematic essay. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a conventional documentary.