France

April in Paris French and Francophone Film Festival Presents France (133min, NR) 2021 Bruno Dumont, director

Hartford premiere of a delightfully provocative satire. Writer/director Bruno Dumont’s new film finds both comedy and drama in the tension between our private and public lives. France stars Léa Seydoux, whose films include No Time to Die, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Blue is the Warmest Color, which won her the Best Actress Palme d’Or at Cannes. She perfectly inhabits her role as a celebrity tv journalist, who “lives for her fans.” But after causing an accident she goes silent, trying to find the suppressed reality of her true self. “Amid the film’s riotous satire…Dumont plants a melancholy identity crisis: the television star and the nation are equally isolated in the distorting mirrors of their own fabricated images.” – Richard Brody, the New Yorker. Discussion following the film with Sara Kippur, Language and Culture Studies, Trinity College.