Critic Reviews

Most of us are aware of the “production” inherent in television news. Dumont presents to us the contradiction and spurs us on, in Brechtian fashion, to try to resolve it.

We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here.

Though France holds water as a black comedy and faintly realistic character study, hitting plausible yet predictable satirical targets, what makes it a good, characteristic Dumont film is its sense of experimentation.

In part because of the depth of Seydoux’s performance, the film becomes less an allegory of a nation and more a gripping character study, a portrait of a mask of personal and professional regard slowly slipping away.

Whatever it’s trying to say, France rewards those who are willing to take the journey without a promise of clear resolution.

Through the character of France, Dumont crafts an entertaining critique of the media more interesting for its formal and stylistic oddities than for its arguments, especially in the way he radically slows down a usually frenetic world.

In “France,” Dumont has not created a commentary on modern life, so don’t approach the movie looking for that. He’s made a movie about the consequences of modern life for one person, a portrait of contemporary mores as seen from the inside.

Even when it’s outlining its own ideas more through rhetoric than character, France keeps us on our toes regarding what’s around the corner. Seydoux’s the chief but hardly the only reason to find out.

Dumont is clearly critiquing the way we mediate life via screens, large and small. There are times in this rambling story when the filmmaker’s point isn’t quite as obvious, but that’s only because he has a habit of trying to jab several moving targets with a sharp stick all at the same time.

Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.