If you liked the touching and moist gaze of Puss in Boots and you want to see the live action version of it in a film that invites easy criticism from the media, images of war Bosna style! and the spectator's boredom in almost every shot, so don't miss Bruno Dumont's France.

With a lot of close-ups, close-ups, low-angle shots, tracking shots forward and backward on the eyes of Léa Seydoux, Bruno Dumont films the descent into hell of France by Meurs, a cynical and frivolous hard news journalist who only thinks to its popularity rating on social networks based on a calculated buzz. And a first question arises: what has stung the critics to award so many stars to a film that embarrasses more than it seduces? Even though it has a luminous Léa Seydoux as its headliner, accompanied by very well interpreted supporting roles, France is distinguished by a plot as depressive as its main character.

Opening with a skilful montage that allows France de Meurs to be placed in a possible Macronist reality in order to signify (or not) that any resemblance to an existing or having existed personality, blah blah blah, pure coincidence, Bruno Dumont's film makes from the outset in the string to moor the steamers where the restraint would require to chisel the lace. Not even parodic or even vulgar, but badly interpreted and embarrassing, the exhibition scene in France immediately makes you feel uncomfortable both in the way of filming and in the over-acting of Léa Seydoux and Blanche Gardin. While we are supposed to discover a journalist who has everything and can do everything from the top of her status as an icon because she talks in the post, we are witnessing the flat spectacle of a France from above which would gravitate in the intellectual spheres flanked by an irresponsible assistant (Blanche Gardin), a writer husband (Benjamin Biolay) and whose life would ultimately be as bland as the conversations at dinner parties while her feelings waver on an overrated media pedestal.

Because Bruno Dumont wants to film a fragility on edge, he stares at Léa-France with his lens over extended shots, and scrutinizes his character's eyes for the expression of a (sick) being. Alas, the profusion becomes harmful, the sequence of situations only increases the ridiculousness as the film and France's state of mind progress: obligatory ceremonies, TV studios, backstage of phony reports, camera shoots on the shoulder, intimate scenes, resignation of the mother and wife who sacrifices her couple on the altar of careerism, attempts at reconstruction... if the director's intention is to criticize the arrogance and the superficiality of his character, he does it with a culpable and damaging lack of subtlety. Of course, it is out of the question to feel empathy for a detestable character and whom Bruno Dumont persists in making people hate. Where France hurts is that France (de Meurs) is too caricatural: you have to be called Sydney Lumet (Network) or Adam McKay (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy) to restore the universe of television and dare a political work whether in the form of a firebrand or a schoolboy comedy. And the mixture of genres operated by Bruno Dumont only cruelly underlines the vacuity of a scenario which hesitates between the portrait of a woman in crisis and criticism of a lost system for journalism.

Wobbly to the point of the grotesque, conveying clichés close to gratuitous populism, France stretches out its useless lament for 2 hours 14 minutes. Wanting to set foot in the PAF, Bruno Dumont tripped over the bias.

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