France is the portrait of a star presenter of a television news who also likes to show off in reports where she puts herself in scene. Starring Léa Seydoux, Blanche Gardin and Benjamin Biolay, this media satire is the work of Bruno Dumont, a filmmaker whose films are rarely unanimous. Maintenance.
Bruno Dumont often arrives where one does not expect him. Revealed thanks to often harsh, sometimes even brutal films (The life of jesus, Humanity, Flanders), the French filmmaker can also embark on a crazy comedy (My Loute), a wacky series (Little Quinquin), or in a clean and stylized historical drama (Jeanne). His works are often admired by some, criticized by others. Launched last summer at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was in the running for the Palme d’Or, his most recent feature film, titled France, is no exception.
“Like all the others, this film divides, recognizes the filmmaker during a videoconference interview granted to Press. Not having an academic thought of things, I believe that this approach conflicts with a more classical conception. ”
I make a cinema where I mix everything and this mixture necessarily exposes me to stick returns. I persevere, because I believe that our reality is to be both in grace and its opposite. Both are possible.
Bruno Dumont, director of France
The power of images
Through the course of France of Meurs (Léa Seydoux), a star journalist that an event will lead to an existential crisis, both professional and intimate, Bruno Dumont notably wanted to echo a time when the notion of information spectacle has gone up a notch again.
“With social networks came a way for the media to look at the world which, from my point of view, makes us enter into fiction. Under the pretext of informing – I have no doubt that we do – we treat the news in a way that is not far from what we do in the cinema. That said, France remains a satire. ”
PHOTO JOHANNA GERON, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Director Bruno Dumont (right) with Benjamin Biolay and Blanche Gardin at 74e Cannes film festival. Léa Seydoux was held at home after testing positive for COVID-19.
The affirmation of the filmmaker is confirmed from the start of his film. We see France de Meurs asking President Emmanuel Macron a question during a press conference. It appears that people believed that the French head of state had really lent himself with good grace to this sequence.
This just shows the power of images. Everyone knows that it is false and that it is a trick, but what interests me the most is to show that with the false, we can do the true. And when someone believes it’s true, I say yes without contradicting it. Because I do cinema.
Director Bruno Dumont, on a scene from France where a character seems to ask a question to Emmanuel Macron
From this manipulation of reality arises precisely the disaffection of the media, according to the filmmaker.
“It generates aggression from the public because they see that an elite represents the world in a truncated and, often, very guilty way. In any case, in France. People are constantly made to feel guilty about everything they do and they are fed up with it. The real is always reduced to a political ideology. I don’t put all journalists in the same basket, however. I make France a heroine who is part of a system of which she is a star, who is alienated from it, and who becomes aware of it. ”
The same type of star
Bruno Dumont also draws a parallel between film stars and stars from the journalistic and political world. He explains the rise of polemicist Éric Zemmour in the polls, even more to the right than Marine Le Pen and his National Gathering, by the mastery of the media cogs that the presumed candidate for the presidency has. And the fascination it exerts.
“It was important for me to show in the film this correspondence between the star of cinema and the star of television, because it is the same one. With the difference that the cinema is in total fiction whereas Zemmour, for example, is a star of reality. He crystallizes the anger of part of the population with a very simple thought, very easy to understand, very accessible, hidden in France for 30 years, and of which he is the representative. ”
PHOTO PROVIDED BY K-FILMS AMERICA
In France, a film by Bruno Dumont, Léa Seydoux embodies a journalist who likes to stage herself in her reports.
Bruno Dumont also confides that he never seeks realism. The character of France de Meurs, he says, is not inspired by any existing presenter. The scenario writer did not seek either to document himself on the medium of the televised information before writing his scenario.
“French cinema can be very sociological in its desire to represent reality, but mine is absolutely not. When I started out, it was wrongly said that I was a social filmmaker. Gold, The life of jesus is a totally bogus movie from a sociological point of view. ”
Above all, I seek the echo of an inner truth rather than representing reality as it is. This is what makes my cinema abrasive. In this story, there is something true about human nature, even though no journalist lives or works the same as France.
Bruno Dumont, director of France
A wish from Léa Seydoux
France Moreover, would never have existed in this way if Léa Seydoux had not one day expressed her wish to work with Bruno Dumont.
” It changes everything. The relationship with an actress then becomes completely different. And easier. When writing the screenplay after our first meeting, I took into account both his star status, which interested me, but also his way of being in life, sympathetic and very funny. I built the character from her and it shows a bit in the film, because Léa is often freewheeling, that is to say that she is not far from playing herself , explains the filmmaker.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY K-FILMS AMERICA
Léa Seydoux in France
“Being in the register of who she is as a star and who she is as a woman was very interesting to me. I think the proposal appealed to her because the story touches both something she knows, the star, and that she knows less, the journalistic world. ”
France will be presented on November 3 and 4 as part of the 27e Cinemania festival. It will hit theaters on November 5.