★★★
Alexander Sokurov is back. The director of Russian Ark, the film that took us on a tour of Saint Petersburg's Hermitage Museum and its history in a single take, has now turned his attention to the Louvre.
![Director Alexander Sokurov focuses on the Louvre in his latest film, but does not translate the story into a ...](/web/20161008200856im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/8/w/z/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grojcp.png/1475474440422.jpg)
This time, his style is very different but his thesis is the same – that a nation's art not only contains its DNA, it supplies the connective tissue that can bind one country to another, despite political differences.
To illustrate his argument, he fixes on Paris during the German Occupation when the Louvre's director, Jacques Jaujard, was doing his best to protect the museum's treasures from the surrounding destruction. By the time the Germans reached the city, most of the collection had been secreted in a group of chateaux outside the city – a manoeuvre that seemed unlikely to defuse the Germans' desire to take possession of all the European art they could lay their hands on.
But Jaujard – and Paris – were lucky. Count Franz Metternich, the officer given the task of curating and appropriating the collection, was an art historian prepared to put the Louvre's welfare before his own career. He and Jaujard became wary collaborators and the treasures remained where they were.
True to form, Sokurov does not translate this story into a straightforward historical documentary. He's arranged it as a discourse on the value of art with his own voice-over commentary and a framing story about the making of the film. From time to time, he breaks off to have Skype conversations with a friend, the captain of a cargo ship caught in a storm so violent he may be forced to jettison his cargo of art objects – a dilemma that is supposed to shed yet more light on Sokurov's musings about art's intrinsic value.
We also get another museum tour in which we come across two competing ghosts: Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, who keeps murmuring its mantra, "Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite"; and Napoleon, who pops up repeatedly, declaring, "C'est moi!" He's not exactly classifying himself as an art object but he is expressing his conviction that the Louvre would be nothing without the pieces extracted from the nations he conquered.
But the nub of the film is in the fictional scenes that have Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) forging their unlikely alliance. Documentary re-enactments can be very risky. One slip and they can morph into a gang of actors playing dress-ups. But these are terse, underplayed and so evocative that they marry perfectly with sepia-toned archival footage of wartime Paris. While Jaujard doesn't say much, there's a poignancy to de Lencquesaing's portrayal of him as a man forever weighing up the compromises he's forced to make for the sake of something only he can protect.
In the end, the film suffers from cultural overload. The story of the embattled sea captain is a sub-plot too far. We don't really need to be reminded we're watching a film – although the final scene, which brings past and present together, delivers a charge that is both sad and ironic.