France review – Léa Seydoux’s celebrity journalist becomes the story

This blunt media satire from Bruno Dumont stars Léa Seydoux as a French celebrity TV journalist whose life becomes part of the news cycle she reports on. Seydoux is terrific as tough cookie current affairs anchor France de Meurs, a bullet-hard professional with a Chanel wardrobe who unscrupulously deploys tears in exchange for ratings. But what happens when the tears are genuine and the pain that De Meurs weeps for is her own? A freak traffic accident involving a delivery rider causes her to re-evaluate her life, but the lure of the job, and the attention that comes with it, is more potent than pretty much anything else in her life.

France is watchable, if not subtle, but the picture labours its message with an overstretched running time and an oddly anticlimactic structure.

On Mubi