134 min | NR | December 10, 2021 | Kino Lorber
France de Meurs is the most famous television journalist in France, and she stages the news as much as she reports it. A car accident cracks her glossy life open and a crisis of conscience leaks out. Bruno Dumont points his camera at the media and never quite decides whether to mock it or mourn it.
France de Meurs is the most famous television journalist in France. She fakes battlefield reports, choreographs refugee crossings for her camera, and turns press conferences into theater. The film follows her at the peak of her brand and then watches it crack. After she strikes a young deliveryman with her car, the gap between her public face and her private self splits open. The whole film asks whether a woman who manufactures emotion for a living can still feel anything that belongs to her.
Léa Seydoux plays France de Meurs as a surface that keeps almost breaking. She summons tears on command and you watch the machinery work. Seydoux lets a real grief leak through the performed one until neither she nor the audience can separate them. Blanche Gardin plays Lou, her producer, as a hype machine who treats every scandal as content and every breakdown as a ratings opportunity. Benjamin Biolay plays Fred, the husband, with a chilly detachment that matches the marriage. Emanuele Arioli plays Charles Castro, a man who arrives claiming to love her, and the film keeps you guessing about what he actually wants.
Dumont writes and directs, and he shoots Seydoux in long static close-ups that dare her face to give something away. The broadcast segments wear their green-screen seams openly, so the war footage looks as fake to us as it should look to her viewers. The interiors are lacquered and freezing, all glass and pale stone, a home that photographs like a showroom. Dumont cuts between France composed under studio lights and France collapsing in a parked car, and the contrast does the satire’s heavy lifting. The camera lingers past comfort, holding on a tear or a stare until the image curdles.
The satire lands its targets too squarely to surprise. Dumont says that media manufactures feeling and that celebrity hollows out the person, and he says it again and again. The tone lurches between deadpan mockery and straight melodrama, and the seams show. What holds the film together is Seydoux, who finds something genuine inside a character built entirely from artifice. France is a study of a woman who has performed sincerity so long she no longer knows where it lives, and the film is most alive when it stops mocking her and starts watching her.