Bruno Dumont’s peculiar blend of the transcendental with a clumsy kind of realism was a natural fit to “Jeannette” and “Joan of Arc,” both films dealing with the same presumed miracle — an ordinary little girl claiming to be guided by Saints. That mix takes on a more ambiguous aura in “France,” which premiered in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes and centers on a news host going through a different but not entirely dissimilar sort of spiritual/existential crisis about what she does for a living and who she is.
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Léa Seydoux plays France De Meurs, a reporter and generally popular media figure with a successful career and a rather miserable personal life. Her young son Jo (Gaëtan Amiel) pretty much hates her, while her novelist husband Fred (Benjamin Biolay) is too focused on his own career to care about her much at all. Not that France really worries about that: all her attention goes to her work.
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The film begins with France at the very height of her powers, catching the attention of Président Macron himself at a press conference. It is already evident that she is much more concerned about making an impression on her peers than she is about anything the politician might be saying. During his meandering answer, she is busy celebrating her little moment in the spotlight by exchanging increasingly obscene looks with her faithful assistant Lou (Blanche Gardin). Dumont extends the scene as if to bring it beyond the joke and better reveal the disgusting, absurd, and shocking nature of that situation. But like most such moments in the film, the critique at its heart feels rather banal, Dumont laboring an obvious point.
When France accidentally bumps her car into a delivery man on his motorcycle, the impact is relatively minimal. The man needs to take three months off work but will soon be back on his feet. Yet the incident sends France into a tailspin, and she begins to struggle with the superficiality of her job, the casual meanness of her guests during the televised “debates” she moderates, and the coldness of her husband and son.
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Dumont had not cast professional actors in lead roles for a while, but it makes sense that he would pick someone who knows how to move and smoothly deliver lines of dialogue for the role of a media-savvy person overly attentive to appearances and perception. Léa Seydoux’s almost surreal beauty adds to the sense of France as somewhat unreal and artificial, while her bright outfits and lipstick often border on the garishly vulgar, a visual critique of the flashy world of the media. But Seydoux is also capable of breaking through this perfect surface to reach true emotion, and much of the tension in the film lies in working out whether France’s subsequently frequent tears are sincere or not.
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Things appear to come to a head when, after a public breakdown, she is sent to a retreat in the mountains. Escaping from a life she no longer fits in, she meets a man who appears to understand the existential ordeal she is going through and offers her a shoulder to lean on. She returns home genuinely happy and feeling no rush to go back to work until she learns of his betrayal. A life of genuine feelings seems too much for her to bear, and she is soon back in front of the camera, throwing herself ever more recklessly into her dangerous war zone reporting and putting together ever more cynically assembled news reports. She returns to what she knows how to do best, but whether her empathy is entirely gone or not remains unclear to the end.
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Through the character of France, Dumont crafts an entertaining critique of the media more interesting for its formal and stylistic oddities than for its arguments, especially in the way he radically slows down a usually frenetic world. The non-professional actors that France meets through her work are so many incursions of the real into her perfectly controlled life and liven up a narrative that can sometimes feel rather dull.
But France also appears to stand, indeed, for the country itself. Phonetically, her full name sounds like “France demeure,” meaning “France remains,” and although the character goes through the wringer, she always gets back on her feet — or rather, on the TV screens, mournfully talking about conflicts in the Middle East or serial killers and other tragedies. Dumont appears to suggest that for all its supposed moments of reckoning, the country remains unchanged. The name is thus ultimately ironic, but another potential reading of “Meurs,” which means “dies,” suggests real sorrow at the sorry state of this nation. Although the country remains, it is slowly dying. It’s a strong sentiment, but one which would have been more powerful if made via more original and therefore punchier observations about the corrupt nature of much of the news media and the country itself.[B]
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