Unreliable, mystifying. Self-centered, irresponsible. Vulnerable, selfish, careerists. What have journalists done wrong to Bruno Dumont to deserve such a harsh portrait? Story of the reporter France de Meurs, delightful bronze face on television who, when not helmeted to reportage in war zones, lives in a luxurious house full of tapestries with her son in obvious lack of affection and her husband, a novelist-butler who earns five times less. her. Revered by Emmanuel Macron (the real one) who, with a game of images, addresses the doll during an institutional press conference and she comments: Maybe she has a crush on me. Host of an evening show at the top of the ratings titled A look at the world in which it ridicules politicians and brings the current unfiltered into French homes.
A madonna all news happy in the crowd as in fashionable suits, chased by selfie hunters, capable of building services for audience use and consumption without embarrassment. France exaggerates and gets angry on command. He pretends solidarity with the wife of the French swamp monster, the case of the day: he holds her hand live and, when the camera goes off, he immediately withdraws it. He manipulates the interview with an anti-Isis militiaman. Simulate the drama of a crossing on a migrant boat and shouts for the scoop. But it collapses when she herself becomes uncontrollable news.
In the car, she runs over a Maghreb rider, helps him, ends up in a reality that she does not know, moves away from the toys of the TV and enters a crisis. France now cries often, for no real reason: she feels the emptiness on which she built her existence and surrenders to tears. On the street, on the sofa at home, under the bombs. Helping the family of the runner invested is not enough to silence the conscience hitherto buried under the fetish of success. The break in a clinic against depression in the mountains and the flirtation with the bibliophile prof is also of little use offering her his shoulder. Genuine pain puts her back on track. Or maybe it derails it forever.
The irregular Dumont makes a merciless analysis of the media universe not only French by lifting the crust of superficiality of its protagonists. What are France’s tears made of? Which, in the midst of the crisis, confides to the psychoanalyst: Everyone draws from my image things that do not belong to me: I would like to be transparent. The guest politician in the studio turns to the fascinating presenter, conveyor of wrong emotions, and wakes her up: She is worse than me, than us. Dumont’s extreme, provocative reflection, a stone in a pigeon house, but centered and very effective. And the satirical line of his latest films continues, My Loute and the series P’tit Quinquin, against intellectuals, acculturated fakes, quarrels and snobs of various extraction who make fun of others and in the meantime accumulate fame and money. The impression that he has fallen in love with the blue-mischievous gaze of La Seydoux, a Circe of cinema capable of losing even 007 – James Bond. Here the mirror of a nation that regrets it grandeur and no longer knows what saint to turn to.
FRANCE by Bruno Dumont
(France-Germany-Italy-Belgium, 2021, duration 133 ‘)
con La Seydoux, Blanche Gardin, Benjamin Biolay, Emanuele Arioli, Juliane Kohler
Rating: *** out of 5
In the halls
23 October 2021 | 08:38
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