October 21, 2021 2:46 pm
An electronic music almost like an organ, a loud music, which announces something high and at the same time impending. Something serious about to happen, maybe an apocalypse, big or small. Beyond its expressive power that comes to support the dramaturgy, this music is precisely the abstract, lyrical announcement of the approaching gravity of things that emerges in spite of everything in a world (made) will-o’-the-wisp, while like a carousel the greatest tragedies flow through the media and mankind runs the risk of collective tragedy, that of the climatic apocalypse.
We see a woman, young, beautiful and blonde, talking on the phone a little hastily with her little son, reassuring him that his father will be home soon. We understand that she is a journalist, accompanied by her producer, once she crosses the threshold of the presidency of the Republic, where a press conference by Emmanuel Macron is about to take place.
It is the beginning of France, the new film by Bruno Dumont presented in competition at the last Cannes, now in cinemas. Dumont is one of the most interesting authors of contemporary cinema, with a multifaceted talent and capable of passing from very different narrative and visual registers from one film to another, always, or almost, with great originality and depth. It was revealed years ago with The restless age (1997) e Humanity (1999), then inexplicably disappeared from the radar of Italian distribution.
In the part of the woman, that is in the main role, we find Léa Seydoux, and she is probably the most beautiful interpretation in the rich filmography of the thirty-five-year-old actress, already known by the Italian public for some films, in particular Adele ‘s life, by Abdellatif Kechiche (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2013), where, as here, it had the main role. But the Italian viewer will also remember her for her works with Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds, 2009) e Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris, 2011). This year in Cannes he was present with four titles, including French dispatch by Wes Anderson e France. And now that it arrives in our cinemas almost simultaneously with the new James Bond and the Dumont film, it is about to descend on the set of Crimes of the future, David Cronenberg’s next feature film.
France it is certainly a satirical film, an equally intimist film, a multifaceted portrait of a modern woman, and a questioning about today’s image and society, a single question split into two sections. Moving in an admirable way on subtle balances to be maintained, given the heterogeneity of the registers, and also accumulating the nuances, despite certain almost coarse but typical underlining of satire.
France is her, a journalist who bears the name of her country, as General De Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic, who had limited himself to having the old name of France as his surname, had not even succeeded. “You are the greatest journalist in France, France!”, Her exalted producer tells her in the car, returning from the press conference with Macron, an extraordinary sequence where the facial expressions between the two women while the president speaks, almost like teenagers in the classroom while speaking the Professor, he oscillates between parody of political discourse and self-parody of journalistic seriousness, and the limits between the two remain indefinable.
In an inverse way to the coarseness of this bubble-world that floats on itself, everything is returned with finesse
France is constantly overdosing on itself, on the cult of personality fueled by its producer, almost its shadow, which exalts it whatever it does, but which in its grotesque being is not without a sort of instinctive cynical intelligence in seizing the way of overturning a difficult situation in favor of France. But France is far from devoid of real humanity and even mystery. Indeed, we soon see a veil of melancholy on her beautiful glossy face as a TV presenter and reporter. That veil will slowly tear through the “canvas” of the digital, glossy and polished TV screen. And the melancholy will become overwhelming.
But first the catalog of all possible reporting topics is unrolled: the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the French soldiers who help the Tuareg against the Islamic State group in the Sahel, a woman of modest class, the companion of a murderous pedophile for years. Throughout the film, we move from glossy TV studios to behind-the-scenes sequences, in the family, and to seamless reportage, like so many artificial bubbles rather than artificial ones. A smooth digital world, a parallel world made up of reportages built more or less at the table, of social networks that relaunch them, of frenetic likes and unreflected comments, which breaks in the gaze of France, she who is “le regard sur le monde “. A car accident, involving a Maghrebi boy on a scooter, is the detonator of something smoldering.
From that moment she feels guilty, feels the pain, empathizes with the boy’s family, very simple people and in adoration towards her. And it helps them financially, despite their refractory modesty. Then, in depression, she retires from the television and falls in love with a lovely boy in a large hotel in the snowy mountains and seems to find himself. In keeping with the director’s filmography, the film deals with rediscovering humanity. This also passes through pain, because reality is made up of this, of mourning over mourning, literal and figurative, of shortcomings towards others, of betrayed loves. Of death. France is called by surname De Meurs, that is you die (“meurs”), but on the sound level it instead recalls both something that dwells (“demeure”), which remains eternal (France itself), and the mores, social customs, morals.
The gravity we were talking about at the beginning will gradually become more and more disruptive. In an inverse way to the coarseness of this bubble-world that floats on itself, everything is returned with finesse. France’s first major upheaval (there will be several), the car accident where the Maghreb boy breaks his leg, occurs as she slowly drives through traffic. A minimal, insignificant movement of concrete reality changes everything, changes the great movement. Just like when she is in the family, there is no physical contact with her husband, a touch of the fingers is the maximum of physicality. We always see them in the living room or kitchen, never in the bedroom, never in the truth of the intimate.
If at the beginning everything is scenography, a glossy image and a falsification of the reality that one pretends to tell, then the real world emerges, albeit with a wavering trend, its massive concreteness. Fundamental in this sense, in several moments but declined in various ways, will be the mountain. Like the snow-capped mountain in front of the hotel that overlooks everything: you no longer know if it is a giant or real screen, you no longer know if it is a beautiful mountain covered in advertising or simply an imposing mountain.
The film would benefit not only from a large screen, but also from an Imax screen, like the one in Cannes. You are inside the postcard mountain, so raised that it seems to touch it. And, a perfect visual metaphor of information that becomes indistinguishable from fiction, moreover the most pandering and tacky, the reconstructed part of the press conference cannot be distinguished from the real images with Macron. But it would also benefit as the oxygen of the original language, of French, an elegant language even when it is vulgar, velvety, perfect in a film that is velvety, suspended, floating in a sort of timelessness while being perfectly immersed in our time without future. A discourse on the original language, which would benefit the best films released so far, such as Japanese Drive my car, where the acting is modest, whispered, sinuous.
Like acting in France, perfect and varied by everyone. The most beautiful female portrait of recent years seen in the cinema. It is the most beautiful recent portrait of France, of its ambivalences, of what pervades it. Secretly.
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