One of her films was called “Of Dolls and Angels”, another “Diary of a Chambermaid”, a third “Farewell, My Queen”.

It is the game that Léa Seydoux has been playing for twenty years, with increasing success, now international: the charade of ambiguity.

Sometimes she is a heavenly or at least noble being, sometimes a deeply earthly being and occasionally also a she-devil.

In "Mission Impossible," she was a cold killer, in James Bond, whom she twice graced (and coveted), agent 007's last love. And while she posed for clothing label after clothing label and a whole gamut of perfumes, names they have Kubrick, Bergman, Rohmer and Pedro Almodóvar as their favorite directors.

So that nobody gets the idea that the beautiful Léa is just a movie star.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

No, Léa Seydoux is what in European cinema really only exists in France: a great actress who also receives the stardust of world fame.

Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert have shown how it's done, and Seydoux proves with each new appearance that she's got the lesson, which is essentially an exercise in balance.

Here a film with Tom Cruise, there one with Wes Anderson or David Cronenberg;

here the cash register, there the art.

So the career, which is based on the presence of a face and the projections of many directors, can go on for decades.

Only one role could add to the splendor: that of a national saint, a patriotic myth.

If Ingrid Bergman was Joan of Arc, why shouldn't Léa Seydoux be Joan of Arc?

The irony of the story is that Bruno Dumont, the director of France, has just made this film.

But "Jeannette/Jeanne", a two-parter starring a ten-year-old girl, went down in cinemas, and its crash burned the subject with it for the foreseeable future.

"France" now looks as if Dumont had to invent a kind of anti-Jeanne-d'Arc, the French anti-heroine par excellence, to deal with his misfortune.

So it was almost inevitable that he cast Léa Seydoux in the lead role.

Because "France" is a deeply ambiguous film, a monster of ambivalence, and this division is reflected impressively in the face of its main character.

The story begins with France making a fool of herself at a press conference at the Elysée Palace and ends with her contrition pictured in front of the photograph of a murdered girl.

In between, France is in North Africa, in the Middle East and with refugees on a rubber dinghy, she walks across red carpets in a white mink cape, allows herself to be interviewed, distributes food to the homeless in Paris and sunbathes in a Bavarian alpine sanatorium.

France de Meurs (her name connotes the French mœurs, the manners, as well as the singular forms of mourir, "to die") is a television presenter with her own program and reporter with her own team,

she records the routines of the screen just as professionally as the rubble deserts of current crisis areas.

She also has an upper-class marriage to a writer and a somewhat opaque relationship with her agent.

And as if all that weren't complicated enough, she also gets herself a lover while taking a cure in the Alps.

It's, what else, an investigative journalist assigned to her.

The failure of the director is a blessing for the film

As you can see, the story isn't just media-critical, it's bursting with media-critical symbolism.

Basically, Dumont, who started out as a philosophy teacher, treats Léa Seydoux no differently than the clients of her advertising campaigns: he dresses her in stories like clothes to see how she looks in them.

But with this narrative fitting, something strange must have happened during filming.

Because the evil satire that Dumont obviously had in mind turns into a compassionate portrait as the film progresses.

The camera tries to hate Léa Seydoux, but it doesn't succeed.

Instead, the initially so steely France looks at us more and more through the eyes of a victim.

Her reputation is gone, her family too, and in the end she has no choice but to flee to the front,

From the director's point of view, "France" failed: the concept with which the film started shattered because of its leading actress.

But nothing better than this breaking could have happened to Bruno Dumont.

Because while his media satire soon finds itself bobbing in the wake of famous role models such as “Network” and “Broadcast News”, the duel between Léa Seydoux and the camera retains a pleasant unpredictability right to the end.

The film could also be read as a meditation on a face, the countenance of a woman struggling to find an authentic expression in the midst of stereotypes: Sometimes it tenses up as if in shock at itself, then it dissolves again into clownish laughter or Madonna-like sobs.

And sometimes it freezes in a mask-like quality that acts like a protective wall.

But this reading would of course be unfair to Léa Seydoux, who doesn't want to show mimic showpieces, but wants to show people with her play, fictitious people who come to life in front of the camera.

In "France" she only has the angel and devil puppets of a half-baked satirical drama of ideas in her hands.

It's all the more exciting to see what she makes of it.