User Reviews

If ever there were a film that embodies the notion of "Life **** and then you die," this would be it. Writer-director Bruno Dumont's latest, a depressing cynical comedy-drama, takes the concept of weltschmerz to an entirely new level. That includes not only the content of the film's narrative, but also the agony that's inflicted upon audiences viewing this tediously slow, meandering, unfocused slog. Told from the perspective of an immensely popular French TV journalist who has everything that everyone supposedly wants -- fame, fortune, wealth, beauty -- the film follows her triumphs and tragedies, all of which leave her feeling eminently empty and depressed. Some of it is personal, some professional, and nearly always in matters of integrity, meaning and fulfillment, conditions that leave life affording us precious few joys. In some ways, the film could also be seen as a metaphor for the current state of society, most notably that of France (the nation) as reflected through the experiences of France de Meurs (the protagonist). The foregoing may be all well and good in theory, but it's sorely lacking where the execution of this production is concerned. Dumont truly seems to be striving for something here, but it ends up feeling more like "reaching" in the end. This overlong, often-vague, frequently repetitive, generally lost cinematic exercise truly is one well worth skipping.

Great movie, I don't know why it has so low ratings. And Lea Seydoux is stunning.

So here we have the story of a TV star who is rich, famous and unhappy. An ode to originality. Sure, it's not so simple after all, but it's also far from the intellectual fable its director clearly believes he's telling. It's difficult to see this film for what it is; a critique of the French media, when it focuses all its attention on a character as vain, empty and inconsequential as the one played by Léa Seydoux. This I mention is not a reflection of her performance, simply of what her character is. She's just as empty and shallow as the world in which she moves, so when the story takes a turn and her character instead of giving the news becomes the news, due to a small accident in which she's involved. The script is unable to genuinely address what that implies and therefore expressing the emotional risk of living in the public eye lacks any real resonance. And more than anything else the film is incredibly monotonous. It has all the same tone throughout, and with the character and her surroundings being so hollow, the odyssey becomes tiresome and trivial. Mostly because France isn't saying anything we don't already know about the facade and manipulation of television media, and evidently isn't providing a distinctive approach to it either.

(Mauro Lanari) Dumont introduces us to a protagonist with persistent mood swings that would be caused by the accumulation of her personal, professional and road accidents. In reality, his direction full of incomprehensible slownesses or ellipses is more bipolar than the life of France de Meurs (pun for "France of Costums": "meurs" reads the same as "mœurs" which, exactly as for the Latin "mores", designates the common social habits or practices of a people or a nation), and of the velleitarian dramedy on the media and political Western system reduced to debordian infotainment there isn't much of both genres.