France (Bruno Dumont)

Pretense and Distortion

Amir Siadat

The central character of Bruno Dumont's latest film (France) is a famous and seemingly successful woman, trapped in a situation that, although it has a dreamy and seductive quality from a distance, is actually bringing her down (perhaps comparable to Diana's situation in Pablo Larraín's Spencer). It is not known whether her depressing solitude is the cause of her turning to the noisy world of media and fame or its effect. Whatever it is, she is lonely and lost, miles away from her image in front of the camera. Dumont has tried to mix this double life with a political satire about the media. His narrative on both levels relies on "pretense" and "distortion". On the one hand, there is a gap between the private life of France (Léa Seydoux) and her public image, and on the other hand, the conflicts between the scene and behind the scenes of the reports that she prepares for her popular TV "show". While displacement and war in France's mise-en-scène become polished images that are even fun and pleasant for the viewer of the media, Dumont's camera is a step further from them, making a moral design. He needed the tears of Léa Seydoux so that something of true human emotions remains in this atmosphere full of deception and fraud. However, even the tears in some moments are like efficient "tactic" to bring the audience along as much as possible (France's audience, and not Dumont's audience); Their source is a personal crisis, but sometimes they "pretend" to be the marks of sympathy with the victims. But what is Bruno Dumont's himself relationship with the situation he portrays and criticizes? In my opinion, in the same press conference at the beginning of the film, he unveils his main "concern" in a humorous way: the aesthetic link between news reports and cinema. The confrontation between France and Emmanuel Macron, first of all, on a metanarrative level, makes the audience pay attention to the mechanism of cinema and the efficiency of montage in forging reality. The further the film goes, the more "artificial" it becomes. Causal logic obviously loosens, and one by one events happen to remind and emphasize the "fakeness" of the incidents: the accident with Baptiste, Charles's text message being accidentally leaked, the sudden error during the live broadcast, the falling of the car into the valley and... I even think Dumont's extreme use of music was intended to spoil the realistic strains of the work (in the sequence of the falling of the car, the exaggeration of the visual and auditory elements doubles). Doesn't Domon's extreme procedure mean that he has decided to act out of harmony with the media propaganda that he doesn't see honesty in it and be truthful? if this procedure puts a "distance" between the audience and his work, doesn't it mean that he has hit the target?