France on France 4: a violent satire carried by a kamikaze Léa Seydoux (review)

Bruno Dumont examines a France hysterized by social networks and continuous news channels.

“I saw Léa Seydoux in France by Bruno Dumont and it captivated me,” director Arthur Harari told us last May at Cannes, where he presented L’Inconnue in competition. If you haven’t watched it yet, catch up session this Tuesday evening on France 4 (and the next day in streaming on France Télévisions).

The film was to be called Par ce demi-clair matin, echoing a collection of texts by Charles Péguy in which the patriotic writer praises the excellence of France. It is finally called, more simply, more directly, France. Like the country he examines, therefore, and like his heroine, France de Meurs, star of a 24-hour news channel, star presenter drunk with her power and in love with her own reflection, who stupefies the masses with populist debates in prime-time and bogus reports on the other side of the world. France is of course the personification of the entire nation, a beautiful and intrepid woman, but who has gradually cut herself off from reality and who, she will literally say during the film, has a heartache. It is just as literally that we must read his surname, Meurs: a name where we hear the idea of ​​home, of permanence, but also of debility and death…