CLICK FOR SHOWTIMES

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. Never one to shy away from provoking his viewers, Dumont (The Life of Jesus, NYFF35) casts Seydoux 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. A film that teases at redemption while refusing to grant absolution, France is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent—a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.

Official Selection: Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival

“Léa Seydoux claims the spotlight as the title character in Bruno Dumont’s pithy and entertaining France, giving a performance that’s cunningly calibrated to mesmerize.”
– Arts Fuse

“This psychological study of a fictitious popular female newscaster may start out conventionally, but the assured director’s long pauses and cruel plot twists quickly turn a quasi attack on the media and its ravenous consumers into a searing critique of both the tedium and the emotional risk of living in the public eye.”
– John Waters, Artforum (Best Films of 2021)

“Bruno Dumont's provocative new film spirals out into something darker as it examines the difficulty of maintaining one's sense of self in a corrosive culture”
– Slash Film

DIRECTED BY
Bruno Dumont

STARRING
Léa Seydoux
Blanche Gardin
Benjamin Biolay