Summary
Bruno Dumont, based on satire, achieves a remarkable and disconcerting mixture of tones and registers to recount the crisis of a diva of French television journalism. The proposal also works thanks to the empathy produced by Léa Seydoux who eats up the screen with her beauty and a formidable performance.
Review:
France de Meurs (sic) is a star journalist for French TV, who lives for her job. But a road accident unleashes an existential crisis in her.
France is a true diva. She is beautiful and charismatic, she is also daring: a celebrity who treats President Macron as equals, she moderates television political debates and acts as a war correspondent while bullets whistle past her.
On first reading, France (the film) may seem like a satire of current show journalism and its supposedly engaged divas and divas, where it shows with very effective humor the value of staging journalistic reports based on the narcissism of the journalist. It is also a foray into France's foreign policy agenda, where the roles of both France, the journalist, and the country overlap.
But suddenly, the satirical register of the story changes from the crisis that breaks out in France. It becomes rare with drama (with touches of nouvelle vague), melodrama and even tragedy and the grotesque without warning, to alternate again with a not-so-pure satirical register in a film that has been definitively redefined. The viewer then feels that something strange is beginning to happen with the narration (and the protagonist), is disconcerted and... realizes that he is watching a Bruno Dumont film, which causes confusion due to the mixture and alternation of tones, a trembling unpredictable to which one can joyfully abandon oneself. And all enhanced by a superb soundtrack by Christophe.
But such a narrative proposal cannot work if there is an unyielding empathy with its protagonist, even with her miseries. And the credit goes to Léa Seydoux, a beautiful and authentic diva playing a... diva, a celebrity for whom everything she did no longer makes sense. The actress is almost permanently on camera and eats up the screen displaying a formidable range of resources with which she composes an increasingly fragmented character. And here I allow myself a digression: I don't know if you noticed how similar she is to Diana Rigg when she played Emma Peel in The Avengers...
Bruno Dumont, based on satire, achieves a remarkable and disconcerting mixture of tones and registers to recount the crisis of a diva of French television journalism. The proposal also works thanks to the empathy produced by Léa Seydoux who eats up the screen with her beauty and a formidable performance.
Review:
France de Meurs (sic) is a star journalist for French TV, who lives for her job. But a road accident unleashes an existential crisis in her.
France is a true diva. She is beautiful and charismatic, she is also daring: a celebrity who treats President Macron as equals, she moderates television political debates and acts as a war correspondent while bullets whistle past her.
On first reading, France (the film) may seem like a satire of current show journalism and its supposedly engaged divas and divas, where it shows with very effective humor the value of staging journalistic reports based on the narcissism of the journalist. It is also a foray into France's foreign policy agenda, where the roles of both France, the journalist, and the country overlap.
But suddenly, the satirical register of the story changes from the crisis that breaks out in France. It becomes rare with drama (with touches of nouvelle vague), melodrama and even tragedy and the grotesque without warning, to alternate again with a not-so-pure satirical register in a film that has been definitively redefined. The viewer then feels that something strange is beginning to happen with the narration (and the protagonist), is disconcerted and... realizes that he is watching a Bruno Dumont film, which causes confusion due to the mixture and alternation of tones, a trembling unpredictable to which one can joyfully abandon oneself. And all enhanced by a superb soundtrack by Christophe.
But such a narrative proposal cannot work if there is an unyielding empathy with its protagonist, even with her miseries. And the credit goes to Léa Seydoux, a beautiful and authentic diva playing a... diva, a celebrity for whom everything she did no longer makes sense. The actress is almost permanently on camera and eats up the screen displaying a formidable range of resources with which she composes an increasingly fragmented character. And here I allow myself a digression: I don't know if you noticed how similar she is to Diana Rigg when she played Emma Peel in The Avengers...