Screen/Society--"France" (Bruno Dumont, 2021) | French Film Series
Speaker(s):Introduced by Prof. Anne-Gaelle Saliot. Q&A to follow screening.
CFFS & Screen/Society present the 2023 French Film Series:
"France" (Bruno Dumont, 2021, 133 min, France, French with English subtitles, DCP)
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