French avant-garde filmmaker Bruno Dumont tried to capture a lot with this metaphorical satire / humorous drama. But it didn’t work out until the end, even though the king of cherries, American filmmaker John Waters, has just put “France” on his list of the best films from 2021. In the fifth place of the best films in 2021, he placed the renowned French film magazine “Cahiers du Cinema”, and the premiere of “France” was in the main program of the Cannes Film Festival. The very name of the film and even the main protagonist France de Meurs (Lea Seydoux) hides a lot of symbolism and if I’m not mistaken her name could be translated as France Death or Death to France.
FRANCE (2021) movie review, plot
It is a very strange film that tries to be a cynical satire not only of French but of Western society as a whole and Dumont tries to ironize and satirize the problems they think today’s rich and seemingly successful members of society have. Generally speaking, “France” is a critique of the French mass media who are personalized in the character of the main protagonist, the celebrity journalist France de Meurs. She initially acts as one of those typical journalistic egotrippers, stars who like to shit and pretend that stories are the most important thing, and her show is actually key to her own self-promotion and the status she enjoys. She really enjoys star status. People stop her on the street, she is the first to ask questions to the president, everyone respects her opinion, and she smiles from numerous front pages.
But after causing a seemingly harmless accident in which the car will be lightly run over by a cyclist named Glove (an Arab, of course), France seems to be experiencing a mental breakdown. She will find it increasingly difficult to cope with fame, and it is as if she has had enough of such a life. He will fall into an identity crisis and start thinking about whether it’s all worth it. She will then end up in a fashionable clinic in the Alps, where similar rich and famous people end up when they experience a mental breakdown, and will soon feel the exploitation and turning someone’s life into a media commodity. Admittedly, France specializes in this because, in addition to hosting the most-watched political show, she herself goes to film reports in crisis areas.
France is also a war reporter from the front lines in Africa and Asia, but everything that has to do with her seems so artificial, fabricated, fake, and so do her reports. From the beginning to the end, the character of France seems very strange. It is as if Dumont threw all possible caricatures and clichés related to the modern media scene into her, so she neglects her son, while her husband is a quasi-writer and Lezilebović envious of her fame and status. There’s also her incredibly irritating and antipathetic assistant Lou (Blanche Gardin) who constantly indulges her. She has acted from the beginning as a despicable character, but she seems to be the product of a system and society that actually exists to create such quasi-stars that people adore to be trampled on even more. I was left quite unspoken by this strange, cynical, hermetic film that constantly dances between drama and comedy and that at times seemed really exhausting. Rating, 6.5 / 10
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