[TIFF 2021] REVIEW: ‘France’ is bad news
Léa Seydoux stars in France, directed by Bruno Dumont.
TV news can be soul-sucking. Few people would ride to the defense of a medium that all too often descends into grids of talking heads yelling at each other, or relies on sensationalized “if it bleeds, it leads” reports. But what should criticism of the genre look like? If you’re French filmmaker Bruno Dumont, it’s a 130 minute, pseudo-art-house character piece starring Léa Seydoux. But try as he might, Dumont’s film rarely feels like anything other than a perfume commercial grafted to an “old man yells at cloud” essay.
Seydoux plays a wildly popular TV anchor named France de Meurs, who hosts a nightly current-affairs program. She alternates between moderating in-studio debates and venturing into war zones to produce high-stakes field reports. De Meurs is evidently well-paid for this: she lives in an opulent (yet bizarrely gothic) apartment with her novelist husband (Benjamin Biolay) and son Jojo (Gaëtan Amiel) and sports fresh-off-the-runway fashions. Despite this success, De Meurs is profoundly unhappy. Her relationship with her husband is ice-cold, her son is disengaged at school, and for nebulous reasons that the film can’t quite communicate, she finds no fulfillment in her work.
I don’t know how it works in France, but the film expects us to believe that De Meurs has the following of a movie star; everywhere she goes, she’s asked for autographs and selfies. People approach her at the scene of a traffic accident, a hospital, even the memorial for a murdered girl. The film injects these moments into dramatic or tragic scenes to repeatedly drive home a point about how TV journalists should not be the centre of attention, and that De Meurs is wrong to entertain the requests. And it might have been funny the first few times, but Dumont repeats them by the dozen.
De Meurs ventures into war zones, apparently only to increase her profile.
Which leads to the question of the film’s tone. At the TIFF screening I attended, the programmer described the movie as being divisive at its Cannes premiere, since audiences couldn’t figure out if the movie is meant as a satire or a heightened melodrama. I’m just as confused as those viewers - just when the movie seems poised to build to some kind of joke, Dumont whips into a lugubrious shot of De Meurs weeping silently as her emotional instability takes hold. A score heavy on Angelo Badalamenti-esque synths sweeps in, and suddenly we’re in the midst of a Dior fragrance ad. This happens so often that it’s impossible to determine which scenes are intended as dramatic high points - where the character is undergoing some meaningful revelation - and what is meant merely to make us uncomfortable.
Perhaps this is part of Dumont’s argument: maybe TV journalists hog too much spotlight and take the attention away from the suffering masses they’re supposed to give voice to. If so, Dumont’s protagonist shows no intention of learning from her mistakes. Her character remains static for the entire runtime, and your sympathy wears thin. She talks about how sad she is, and throws herself at various cures: financially supporting an underprivileged family, working at a food charity, and travelling to a Swiss mountain retreat. None of it sticks, and yet she doesn’t clue in to the fact that the news business might need to change. So the film’s ultimate conclusion is a pessimistic one, and leaves us exactly where we started.
Dumont also indulges in a number of visual flourishes, which are initially interesting but don’t connect with what he’s trying to say. At various points, the exterior of De Meurs’ car appears to be missing as she drives around Paris - there’s no roof or doors. In other sequences, Dumont uses the old-school rear-projection method to show people driving, and the purpose is unclear, other than to conjure memories of classic melodramas. Why the car scenes are like this and everything else is relatively contemporary is a mystery, and after all the mental energy you spend trying to puzzle out the film’s tone, you don’t have a lot of patience left for the technical aspects.
There are undoubtedly good stories to be told about news production, and the selfish or capitalist interests that get involved. But for my money, another screening of Broadcast News or even an episode of The Newsroom - like France, another story chock full of satire and pomposity - would be better. Something tells me we’re not going to reform TV news by weeping.
France gets one and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Like several other subplots, the one about De Meurs’ affair goes on much too long.
I was surprised to see the runtime is only 2 ¼ hours - it felt like 4.
The movie might have been a lot better if it centered on De Meurs’ producer Lou (Blanche Gardin), with De Meurs as an unstable secondary character.