Picture of the movie France © 3B
Bruno Dumont Attacks the Media Machine in France
After Jeanne, which obtained a Special Mention from the Jury of Un Certain Regard in 2019, Bruno Dumont has returned to Cannes, In Competition this time, with France. A disillusioned portrait of the media and a critique of how it fictionalizes reality, the film focuses on a famous journalist at a 24 hour cable news channel, played by Léa Seydoux.
Bruno Dumont already turned to the writings of Charles Péguy when he adapted the writer’s works “Jeanne d'Arc” (1897) and “Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc” (1910) for his films Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Jeannette, l'enfance de Jeanne d'Arc) and Jeanne. He has returned to this author again for France, taking his inspiration from the posthumous anthology “Par ce demi-clair matin”.
France de Meurs is famous journalist, beloved by all, a media star known for the sensational stories she reports for a 24 hour news channel. As is often the case during a meteoric media rise, the fall is brutal. What TV viewers see as an original, daring and raw look at reality, France suddenly comes to see as charade, filter, theatre. With France, Bruno Dumont brings to the screen the disillusion of a woman sucked in by a hyper-connected, bloated and unhealthy system. He makes an acerbic and biting critique of the milieu of news journalism, where the real seems to be presented as such but is in fact reconstructed, reworked and staged.
From then on France de Meurs makes herself the incarnation of the France – the country this time – that feeds this media machine in its search for buzz, the sensational, the spectacular, a facet incarnated by Blanche Gardin, a television producer obsessed by ratings. A film that audaciously questions an alienated and alienating system in which, according to Dumont, “reality becomes fiction, the real, a parallel world.”
