Léa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling new film, which starts out as a satire of the contemporary news media before steadily spiraling out into something richer and darker. Never one to shy away from provoking his viewers, Dumont ("The Life of Jesus") casts Seydoux as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, homelife, and psychological stability are shaken after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street. This accident triggers a series of self-reckonings, as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. A film that teases at redemption while refusing to grant absolution, FRANCE is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent—a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.
Director
Bruno Dumont
Cast
Benjamin Biolay, Blanche Gardin, Emanuele Arioli, Gaëtan Amiel, Jawad Zemmar, Juliane Köhler, Léa Seydoux, Marco Bettini
Rating
Year
2022
Country
France, Germany, Italy, Belgium
Language
French, German, English
Main Trailer
Reviews
- "Though FRANCE holds water as a black comedy and faintly realistic character study, hitting plausible yet predictable satirical targets, what makes it a good, characteristic Dumont film is its sense of experimentation."
- The Film Stage - "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 Playlist - "Dumont delivers wild twists at a hectic pace, creating a kaleidoscopic frenzy of unreality and turning the daily life of a celebrity into a hallucinatory, media-saturated distortion."
- The New Yorker
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival
- Toronto Int'l Film Festival
- Busan Int'l Film Festival
- New York Film Festival
- Hamburg Film Festival
- European Film Festival Palic