Writer-director Bruno Dumont’s “France” gives Léa Seydoux, most recently in “The French Dispatch,” a full range of emotions to tap. Some are real, some are reality-adjacent, some her character puts on like an outfit she hopes will fit.
Seydoux plays France de Meurs, the toast of Paris TV news journalism and rabidly popular host of “A View of the World.” Dumont naming his protagonist after her country offers ample opportunity for allegorical expansion. If France is fundamentally hollow, or hypocritical, or lost, isn’t her homeland too?
Straight off, at a presidential news conference, France has been coached by her vaping social media addict of a producer (Blanche Gardin, wryly perfect) to “waste” the politician at her earliest opportunity. France, whose work life occasionally intersects with her distant novelist husband and their scholastically troubled son, lives to enhance her sky-high popularity. She can’t go 10 meters down a sidewalk without two more fans asking for a selfie, which she generally obliges, though her soul seems to be visibly corroding as the film goes on.
