◎ Secretary of the round head
I used to fantasize about a movie where every sentence in the movie is a lie, and people live in it as if there were no problems. Now it seems that this movie has been made, not only every sentence, but also completely and completely false.
The film is the film "France", which was shortlisted for the main competition section of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, directed by French director Bruno Dumont, and was named one of the top ten of the year by film handbook magazine in 2021. Since the 1990s, Dumont has become one of the most original and critical film directors in France, with masterpieces. From "Joan of Arc" to "Joan of Arc", from "Little Wide" to "Wide and Non-Human", he is accustomed to picking out the most confusing parts of the image, squeezing out the water completely, and then returning to a seemingly normal framework for the audience to chew out a strange smell. It's no exaggeration to say that almost every new dumont can break through our understanding of a genre, genre, or even the film ontology.
France de Meurs, as can be seen from the heroine of the same name as France, is a fable about France or all French people. France, a French celebrity, TELEVISION host and journalist known for her sharp reporting and risk-taking, travels to the front lines of the war several times to cover the refugee crisis, both to get first-hand news and naturally with personal ambitions to make a splash. Dumont went out of her way to show us how France was interviewing on the ground, and we also saw how she directed the cinematographer to shoot some completely unknown or posed shots, and then, like a director, intercepted the most emotionally intense parts, grouped them together, accompanied by commentaries, and concocted a series of "blockbuster" reports that looked very coherent, real, and emotionally impactful.
Of course, France also has a very clear understanding and positioning of her own identity, although she rushed to the front line, but she will never be in the same boat with refugees, even in the gap between guns and bullets, you can find a holiday place for her to entertain Bourgeois not far away. She creates a certain degree of truth, and exaggerates or distorts these "personal experiences" as some kind of lie, which is her two-sidedness as a program anchor, and the inevitable otherness of an outsider in a developed country.
As the plot developed, France began to fall into a crisis of public opinion, and she herself began to make headlines: first because of the collision with people, she was hyped up by the media, and then because her agent ridiculed refugees in the program and was accidentally broadcast by public opinion. The agent around her can unswervingly advise her no matter what happens, and at the same time cheer up, creating the image of a "national red man" to the outside world, and creating a prosperous atmosphere of mixed true and false for France, because of the name of protection, it is deceived.
Falsehood and lies are the central themes of this film. France witnessed the hypocrisy of the communication between the people around him: at a family banquet, france's husband created a new book that won the praise of his friends present, but when the author expected serious discussion, the friends responded with extremely perfunctory sentences such as "compact" and "lively", because no one had really read the book.
Banquets always seemed to be a hub of lies, people maintained the social etiquette of the upper class, the rich talked about capitalism "is to give themselves to others"; a noblewoman seemed to want to ask France for autographs, and then immediately changed the subject because she did not have a pen on her body, and left indifferently. Exhausted, France is determined to quit the media circle and go on vacation in a foreign country, thinking that she has accidentally gained a sweet love, even if the other party's purpose of approaching her is not simple. In the end, we found that France was nothing more than one of the French Republics, and everyone emitted a similar smell, and everyone smelled each other's stench, and none of them were spared.
At this point, the film can be said to be a sweeping critique of French society in an all-round way without dead ends. However, France is by no means a simple work of cynicism.
In the book "Lost Shadows" written by the famous French film historian Antoine de Baecque, there is an interesting detail: in the French 1950s and 1960s, the first 3 to 5 rows of each screening hall in the cinema were always occupied by fans, who wanted to be close enough to the screen, immersed themselves in the image, removed the screen frame, and let the film and life merge through the eyes. The production and manufacture of the vast majority of films in the world certainly feeds back this desire—to make the audience believe in it, sink into it, fall in love with it, be captured by it, call it real. But "France" is a work that is completely the opposite of the way it is— it walks in Brecht's path, always trying to push the audience away from their seats and screens, questioning the documentary nature and supreme authority of the images, and even doubting the film itself. This concept is deeply rooted in the capillaries of the film, and every shot, every frame, every detail is beyond recognition.
In fact, from the very beginning of the film, Dumont creates a shocking illusion for the audience: a presidential press conference that is not normally possible in the film. Through skillful sound and picture coordination and computer synthesis, Dumont let Macron and France interact with each other, making people wonder whether the creators really spent a lot of money to arrange such a big drama. With this as a starting point, the film uses various means to achieve a defamiliarization effect, trying to distance the audience, realize the falsity of the image, and thus reflect on it.
An interesting detail is that In her press reports, France always uses a way of confronting the camera with questions, that is, the camera as the subject, which confuses two impossible points of view, which is obviously a very unprofessional approach. The reason why Dumont is set up in this way, on the one hand, is undoubtedly to satirize the non-professionalism of French news shooting, on the other hand, he also wants to prompt the audience with the sense of error in news production through this lens, so that the audience can truly realize this random patchwork, irrelevant image garbage.
Of course, the film's superb skill also lies in the fact that due to the complexity of the characters and plot, the director does not want to create an excessive distance between the audience and the film, so its technique often has an extremely subtle sense of proportion, reaching a balance between pushing and pulling.
France knocked down an immigrant while driving, and she visited the home of the victim, who described herself as a poor, jobless and incomeless family, but the spacious and bright two-story building shown by the camera was clearly different from the tragic description of the other party. France is clearly aware of the problem and falls into contemplation — "contemplation" is also a key action throughout the film, whenever Dumont pushes the picture into the actor's face with a push-pull camera — not only France's contemplative time, but also Dumont's moment of separation: time for the audience to identify lies and falsehoods. Reluctantly, France eventually had to pull out the check, because she realized that even if everything was false in front of her, she would have to pay for her actions and preserve her hard-won public image.
In an interview with The Film Handbook, the film's lead actress, Raya Saidu, dissects Dumont's intentions very precisely: "... Dumont's preference is the opposite, and he wants the audience to see the falsity and incongruity of the film. He was deliberately pursuing some kind of imperfection. And, as she says, the film does move towards an increasingly outrageous "imperfection" in terms of scene scheduling: perhaps the sharp-eyed audience has long seen that all the shots shot in the car are set, and the pictures outside the car window are also from the classical background projection method rather than the real shooting. But in any case, it is still difficult to imagine that Dumont would be so "unscrupulous" and not care about the creation of illusions - at some point, France actually stepped out of the car without doors, and even the background projection image was suddenly cut (the film 01:45:45, if you look closely, you can even clearly see the texture of the LED screen). In fact, in such films, background projection is usually no longer necessary, and interrupting the illusion in this way is even more "rough". All of this is no coincidence, but points to Dumont's personal aesthetic choice: to create a radical rift that allows the audience to "look straight" rather than "ignore", to contemplate rather than immerse.
Similar techniques exist in France: eerie and off-the-beaten-pathologies, cheesy and cutscene car accident passages, and even France's dress is in Dumont's elaborate arrangement—a down jacket that looks furry from a distance and paints fur patterns up close. "France" gives us a story, but deliberately pulls us out of the comfort zone created by ordinary images for the audience, only because in dumont's case, everything is fake, everything is absurd.
The film's condemnation of people and questioning of the image continues until the end. After the loss of relatives, France was once again chased and intercepted by lovers, the two walked on the road, and a yellow-haired brother ran to them for no reason and trampled a shared bicycle into a lump of scrap iron. Witnessing all this, France stopped where he was, leaned on his lover's shoulder, showed a mysterious smile, and stared at the camera ahead. It is at this moment that we realize that France has "trespassed", that she has begun to notice the presence of Dumont's footage, and that the whole film may have become some sort of tool for France himself to shape his image—that everything she shows in two hours, whether weak or strong, sincere or false, is in danger of being overthrown. The actors and characters "seize power", and the director shoots the film, but has to encounter the threat of being interpreted by the opaque actions and faces of others, and this is only the result of a look, a smile, a gaze. The film, this form of a fake, righteous, and authentic medium, almost completely collapsed in an instant.
It was also at this moment that France left a tear that did not know whether it was true or not. Maybe it's just a drop of chemical, or maybe it's still home to the most innocent emotions of human beings who are accustomed to making lies.