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.
Covering war-torn countries’ violence, she treats freedom-fighting soldiers as extras in her own biopic, snapping her fingers like a testy parent, ginning up the crocodile tears for another close-up photographed by her camera crew. We have been here before, satirically, in all sorts of movies. But “France” takes a welcome detour soon enough. Seydoux’s character, on the phone (always) in traffic, accidentally runs into a motorcyclist. This sends the narrative in a fruitfully ambiguous direction: Can a media machine find a more meaningful, empathetic direction in life before it’s too late?
Dumont has developed into a more versatile and unpredictable world-class filmmaker than many would’ve guessed. My first encounter with his work came in the blunt, harsh, memorable wartime character study “Flanders” (2006), and since then he has gone for broke, or nearly, testing limits and borders in various genres. With “France” he begins with one sort of black comedy laced with satiric venom, and ends with an ashen, “made for each other” romcom ending turned utterly inside out.
Dumont and Seydoux work beautifully together, as France barges into real-life scenes of potential wartime carnage like an auteur used to getting her own way. (“Hold your weapon like this,” she bosses one soldier. “Look a little tougher.”) As the film progresses, our antiheroine reroutes her own life, willingly, for a month at a swank Alpine clinic where she’s treated for depression. There, she meets a Latin teacher (Emanuele Arioli), and her heartstrings go “zing.” This, she thinks, is either a pleasant, cheating distraction or my soul mate.
The movie, it must be said, doesn’t always meet Seydoux’s high level of complex engagement. Dumont takes plenty of amusing if discursive time for minor characters’ expressions of fawning, or rich-liberal smugness. “Capitalism is the gift of oneself to others,” pronounces an aging male party guest at a charitable gala attended by France. Even when it’s outlining its own ideas more through rhetoric than character, “France” keeps us on our toes regarding what’s around the corner. Seydoux’s the chief but hardly the only reason to find out.
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‘FRANCE’
3 stars (out of 4)
No MPAA rating (some violence and language)
Running time: 2:13
Where to watch: Now playing in theaters
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