France De Meurs is a journalist. “You are the greatest journalist in France, France!” her assistant, the irresistible Blanche Gardin, delights in repeating to her.
France, played by Léa Seydoux, works on a television news programme in which she literally stages the subjects she covers. We see her going off to report from a war-torn Middle Eastern country (Syria?) and directing her technical crew and local contacts as a theatre director would direct actors. She positions the camera, puts her own words in the mouths of interviewees, dictates their gestures and emotions, systematically gives herself the leading role, all in a frenzied atmosphere, as if she feared that the best shot to get is the one she is in the process of missing.
Another caustic scene shows her aboard a migrant boat… itself followed by the powerful speedboat on which the technical crew is working. France De Meurs’s assistant laments that there were no drownings because “it would have been good for the report”…
While the film wavers between a biting critique of the media system and the portrait of a woman who gradually begins to crack, what remains with us, above all, is a feeling of obscenity. The film’s first scene is emblematic in this respect. We enter a press conference at the Élysée. France asks President Macron a question that is neither more brilliant nor more incisive than any other, but her entourage all seem on the verge of orgasm, with sexualised gestures to match. Social media explodes, France exults.
But the tyranny of spectacle spares no one, not even its most faithful soldiers. France De Meurs will fall victim to it in her turn. She will suffer a series of setbacks through which her private life is systematically violated and thrown to the public. The process culminates when the film’s director, Bruno Dumont, films France in extreme close-up as she collapses at the wheel of her car. The camera is placed below her face and scrutinises at length the heroine disfiguring herself under the effect of anger and grief. In a striking mise en abyme, we become the voyeurs we were condemning in the first part of the film. Whether with discomfort or delight, we watch France’s face – or that of the actress who plays her – twist as is rarely shown in cinema, in a shot that seems to stretch on interminably and about which we wonder how far it will go and what more it will show us of this disintegration. And while she is at her lowest, her assistant tries to support her by explaining how wonderful this fall is, since her rebirth will be all the more spectacular, and that this is what the public wants: extreme emotions. “People are going to adore you, France! It’s going to be huge! ”
The film has divided the media, some no doubt feeling too attacked by this biting portrait of an unscrupulous system. Yet Bruno Dumont could have gone even further, by focusing more on dismantling the financial, political and power mechanisms of this system. He prefers to stay as close as possible to his character, and to show her gradual humanisation through a series of existential events. But where the critics who scratched at the film were not mistaken is that the feeling that remains with us in the days after the screening is one of deep disgust. And it is this disgust, at the media circus we are immersed in, that gets us talking long after the credits have rolled.
Medical director of the André Boulloche Children’s Day Hospital in Paris, she works more particularly on the relationships that young audiences have with screens, communication with young children, and autism.
