French auteur Bruno Dumont is as gloriously gifted as he is unpredictable. To date, he has directed 10 wildly different feature films. Where to begin? The gritty unsimulated sex of The Life of Jesus; the wild Catholic-Jihadi mysticism of Hadewijch; the cannibal-themed eat-the-rich comedy of Slack Bay, and a surreal two-part rock opera inspired by Joan of Arc.
France is as broad as the hexagon-shaped country it giddily satirises. Shots are fired at the 24-hour news cycle, embedded journalism, and Macronism in a having-it-all melodrama built around a celebrity journalist bluntly named France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux, never better).
A nauseating opening sequence deftly places France and her fawning producer Lou (Blanche Gardin) at a Macron press conference; their heart hand signs signify the beginning of some hilariously cynical reportage, including a successful attempt to choreograph a North African war zone. “Try to look stronger, tougher,” she instructs her subjects.
Later, she chronicles boat migrants from the safety of a yacht. Mostly, she’s in it for the selfies.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
Away from her glittering career, she shares a swish Parisian apartment (Place des Vosges address, artwork-heavy walls) with her dull essay-novelist husband and son.
Her life is inexplicably disrupted when she rear-ends a motorcycle courier, Baptiste (Jawad Zemmar). Suddenly she’s tabloid fodder, a victim of the infotainment she helped fashion. She dutifully visits Baptiste and his family. Is she playing to the cameras? Or has guilt awakened a sense of humanity that wasn’t there before?
Various sentiments – and Seydoux’s cleverly ambiguous performance – suggest that France is too shallow for such self-realisation. When a fan asks her if she is left- or right-wing, she looks genuinely perplexed: “What difference would it make?”
Dumont’s eventful script namechecks Bertolt Brecht as the director hurls misfortunes and contradictions at his heroine. An attempt to stay out of the limelight at a clinic for the rich and famous results in an affair with an undercover journalist that creates another scandal for France. Many pitch-black jokes are reaped from the shared name.
We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here. France, like the director, makes for a pleasing guessing game. The late composer Christophe, whose iconic track Road to Salina enlivened Kill Bill Vol 2 and Let the Bodies Tan, takes his final bow with a superb score.
