France

Directed by Bruno Dumont
Year: 2021
Country: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium
Language: French with English subtitles

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, NYFF35) 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.

"A star vehicle for Léa Seydoux, whose acting is these days hitting a new level of richness."


“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.”


“Dazzling. A fantastically pleasurable cinematic delight… bolstered by one helluva committed Lea Seydoux performance.”


“Dumont’s shift across the last decade into outright absurdity, and his exuberant mistrust of form, is grounded by Seydoux’s star persona.”


"A biting and complex satire on our relationship with the media.”


"Bruno Dumont examines a France that has been hijacked by social media and 24/7 news. A violent satire, shot through with lightning bolts of melodrama, interpreted by Lea Seydoux gone full kamikaze."


"The director offers Léa Seydoux her most resplendent role to date, that of a woman destroyed by the media complex in which she is trapped."


Cast
Léa Seydoux
Blanche Gardin
Benjamin Biolay
Emanuele Arioli

Crew
Directed by Bruno Dumont
Writer Bruno Dumont