Films This Week 1/07/22
by Gary Palmucci | 7th January 2022 | Gary's Corner
This week’s addition to our Virtual Cinema schedule showcases France’s brightest (and hardest working) star of the decade, Léa Seydoux. In addition to being a magnetic Bond Girl this fall, she appeared in four films in last summer’s Cannes Film Festival including — The French Dispatch — but was unable to walk the famous red carpet even once due to a bout of Covid.
The Cannes movie new to our lineup today is titled France, after the character she plays, France de Meurs, a popular, often flamboyant television anchor and correspondent who hosts a nightly news show. Provocative director Bruno Dumont has made a number of films set in both contemporary and other times in France that, as NY Times critic Tony Scott accurately puts it, “vibrate with metaphysical implications.”
In a tour de force performance, Seydoux embodies this complex character’s path from electric fame through a spiral of professional and personal tragedies, all the while being guided by her director’s customary obsession with — as Scott again describes — “the eruption of the divine into ordinary life.”
It’s a kinetic journey, in the hands of this brave, protean “Actress of the Moment.”
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema