France (Bruno Dumont, 2021) | French Film Series

Part of the 2023 French Film Series:

France
(Bruno Dumont, 2021, 133 min, France, French with English subtitles, DCP)

-- Introduced by Prof. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot (Romance Studies/Cinematic Arts). Q&A to follow.

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. Seydoux stars 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. Tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent, France is a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.

“Amid the film's riotous satire involving tricked-out news and political distortions, Dumont plants a melancholy melodrama of an identity crisis... ” – Richard Brody, New Yorker

“The best star vehicle Léa Seydoux has had thus far, ... France cuts straight to the bone.” – In Review Online

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