Regardless of the Pope of Trash’s seal of approval, it’s typically onerous to understand the bitter Gallic black comedy “France” on condition that it begins—and usually continues—as a basic critique of French mass media, but additionally principally fusses over one particular media character phony. Léa Seydoux performs France de Meurs, a clout-chasing discuss present host. France thinks she’s a journalist, however, she’s actually a vapid gadfly and a would-be demagogue.
Author/director Bruno Dumont (“Outdoors Devil,” “Joan of Arc”) can’t get sufficient of France, as a result of she solely thinks that she’s mastered a personality-driven system of faux-populist reporting that she’s actually internalized and thus accepted at face worth. Seydoux’s character struggles to vary her self-image after she unintentionally strikes a motorcyclist together with her automobile. However, France was in all probability already doomed by the point we met her.
Dumont’s curiosity in France is mostly extra ambiguous than it’s strictly essential, however, he additionally doesn’t appear to care sufficient about Seydoux’s character to actively develop her. He appears to love the concept of France greater than something specific about her.
Within the opening scenes in “France,” Dumont throws a kitchen sink’s price of contempt at Seydoux’s anti-heroine, a self-absorbed media character who interviews political pundits and likewise inserts herself into human curiosity tales on her widespread TV information program. At a press convention, France overtly asks one politician, relating to the “insurrectional state of France,” if he’s simply “heedless or powerless.” He responds to her query with undue deference, as if her celeb standing demanded his severe consideration. France and her yes-woman producer Lou (Blanche Gardin) change conceited—and proudly vulgar—gestures to one another, like faculty youngsters passing notes to one another without the worry of being punished.
Dumont continues to sneer at France and her protecting social/skilled bubble by following her first at work, then at dwelling. At work, France evades aggressive pundits with the identical ease and pace that she directs and develops on-the-spot interview segments in order that they are often minimized and packaged for her TV program. At dwelling, France dotes on her son Jo (Gaëtan Amiel) and avoids her jealous husband Fredric (Benjamin Biolay). These two equally loveless worlds inevitably collide in a sequence of tiresome episodes that solely reveal how delusional France is for having ever thought that she is as particular as she is media-savvy.
France is so often approached for on-the-spot selfies and autographs that she inevitably will get reeled in by two males who don’t appear fascinated about her fame. There’s Charles Castro (Emanuele Arioli), a Latin scholar and would-be suitor whose motives are so apparent that he’s, in the end, quite a bit funnier as a working joke (he simply received’t go away!) than as a supporting character (however possibly he actually loves her!). After which there’s Baptiste (Jawad Zemmar), the above-mentioned motorcyclist who turns into an uneasy object for France’s charity (his mother and father can’t work, and he should present for them!).
Time and again, Dumont reminds us of how little he thinks of France. Her cardinal sin isn’t that she’s too good at her job, although that additionally makes her an apparent goal for our contempt. What actually makes France a typical Dumont martyr is that she has no clue what actually makes her job—and the unnaturally un-nuanced, demeaning point-of-view that it confirms—so contemptible: that the media has made us settle for that it’s regular to see the world in simplistic, soundbite-friendly phrases. France is a product of that system, and he or she’ll in the end by no means actually change, as a result of once more, she has no clue to find out how to cope. Quite, she’ll preserve unwittingly demeaning her interview topics and insulting her viewers simply because she’s by no means actually jarred out of her circle of effect, no matter what number of private and public crises threaten France. Alan Partridge, she ain’t.
As normal, Dumont is an extra fascinating director than a screenwriter, particularly when he blocks and holds a shot lengthy sufficient to recommend that there’s much more happening than his ignoble on-screen characters may probably say, not to mention pay attention to. Then once more: spending a lot of time with France, a constant hole character is commonly exhausting.
France’s internal life and qualities are solely hinted at by Seydoux’s usually delicate efficiency. As a result of each time France nearly sees a doubtlessly disagreeable facet of herself, she’s sidetracked by airhead enablers that preserve her self-consciousness, however unaware. In a later scene, Lou tries to consolation France by telling her that she’s an “icon,” and icons are “product of mud.” That’s the solipsistic level that Dumont makes France circle round all through “France,” and with a negligible variation. In principle, that type of self-victimization may very well be humorous; in this actuality, not a lot.