I confess that I am not a big fan of Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov. Many consider him the greatest Russian director of the 21st century and Tarkovsky's successor on Earth. I wasn't at all excited (euphemism!) About 'Russian Ark', I liked more 'The Sun' and 'Faust', but none of them managed to get more than a grade of 8 on IMDB from me. 'Francofonia' made in 2015, his latest project that hit the screens, did not make me change my mind.

How could I describe 'Francofonia'? Maybe we can talk about it as a personal documentary, or as a filmed essay on art museums and their place in European history, some kind of a sequel to 'Russian Ark' from this point of view. The Hermitage is also mentioned, by the way. Sokurov takes us through the history of the Parisian Louvre without going into details, without dwelling too much on any work of art. There is a central story, that of the German occupation and the confrontation in the period between 1940 and 1942 between the French administrator of the museum, Jacques Jaujard, and the head of the German section responsible for art in the occupied countries, count Wolff-Metternich, which turned into a tacit collaboration. The museum's art treasures were spared destruction and transfer as war trophies to temporarily victorious Germany. This is a story that has also been told several times in writing and on screen.

The docu-drama element is quite fragile and does not bring anything new to those who are minimally familiar with the subject. The essay part includes comments (by the director, I think) about the fragility of art and museums that house heritage treasures. To support this idea, a side story is introduced in which the commentating director talks via the Internet to the captain of a ship carrying containers (maybe with works of art?) on a stormy sea. It combines in a free collage documentary sequences, elements of docu-drama, plus slightly ridiculous scenes with Napoleon and Marianne, the symbol of France, serving as guides through the empty rooms of the museum. The commentary is vaguely poetic, null in depth of information, and slightly historically biased when trying to draw a forced comparison between the fate of Paris and the Louvre on the one hand and that of Leningrad besieged during the war and the Hermitage. In short, a personal film, which tries to be interesting and original, but only manages to be flat and pretentious.

Revered Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's paean to the Louvre Museum and mankind's art treasure is an inventive genre-buster but also a bemusing underachiever. Reconstructing the scenarios of Louvre under Nazi occupation during WWII, Sokurov blots out the distinctions between documentary and fiction filmmaking: archival documents and vintage photos, recurring shots of an anonymous apartment at present where video footage of a struggling cargo ship amid the choppy ocean is playing on the computer, interlaced into a lax narrative re-enacting the story between Jacques Jaujard (de Lencquesaing),the director of the French National Museums and a Nazi officer, Count Franz Wolff-Metternich (Utzerath),predominantly, their so-called Kunstschutz (art protection) movement during WWII, which has spawned a feeble Hollywood dramatization, George Clooney's star-studded THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014).

Yet, the film's overall effort fails to pass muster as a competent infotainment which dissects the cardinal situation where arts and warfare corralled together, Sokurov's platitudinous commentaries breathe with a wisp of solipsistic sentiment, although perambulating inside the Louvre is inherently enchanting, and Sokurov's slick camera-work guides viewer to the ensconced masterpieces with his trademark aplomb and dexterity, not to mention the awesome temporal morphing panorama feat. Personally, the segment where the camera slithers around a mummy exhibit is quaintly numinous. But our tour is often interrupted by a resurrected Napoléon Bonaparte (Nemeth),repugnant and irksome in his boosted egoism, and Marianne (Korthals Altes) repetitively uttering the incantation of "liberty, equality and fraternity", when you have the entire Louvre at your feet, but we are only allowed to glance at such a limited purview, rank dissatisfaction inevitably materializes. Stripped off the "single take" stunt with which he has stunned the world in Russian ARK (2002),this belated pendant work haplessly betrays that Sokurov's ambition and talent has ebbed away significantly, especially when his disaffected grouse can be overtly detected through counterpointing the disparate circumstances between France and his fatherland, a close-minded overtone of editorializing writ large woefully.

This is an odd film – strangely constructed. It's on the avant-garde side, and poetic. It's definitely not a touristy look at the Louvre.

The focus (and this film is sometimes out of focus) is on the Louvre during the German occupation of Paris in the war years. There are fictitious historical re-enactments of the key French and German figures who were involved with the Louvre – and this works. They are long forgotten and the film-makers gives' them a new lease on life. The Napoleon figure was entertaining too!

There are mysterious side-bars that crop up in this film. I could not for the life of me understand the interruptions showing a container ship caught in a North Atlantic storm. The conversations were with a man named Dirk speaking in English and with the director speaking in Russian.

Of interest for museum aficionados and those interested in 20th century French history.