France, review: Léa Seydoux can’t quite keep this media-world satire on target

December was abuzz with talk of “nepo babies”: a new term for successful young things with older relatives whose connections may or may not have nepotistically smoothed their paths to said success. So it feels fitting that the month should end with the release of a film starring Léa Seydoux, the hottest French actress of the moment, whose grandfather happens to be the chairman of the entertainment conglomerate Pathé, and grand-uncle the chairman of the French film studio Gaumont.

Seydoux is a confounding test case for nepo baby objectors since, in the cinema at least, star quality can’t be bestowed like a seat in the boardroom: if the camera can’t see it, you can bet no one else will. And over the past 15 years, Seydoux has shown it time and again – in her Palme d’Or-winning performance in Blue is the Warmest Colour, her collaborations with Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and David Cronenberg, and even her two Bond films opposite Daniel Craig.

It’s certainly impossible to imagine this cryptic, repetitive and ultimately frustrating Paris media-world satire would even exist if Seydoux hadn’t existed first to agree to appear in it, so tailored is it to her peculiar half-sensual, half-opaque screen presence. She plays France de Meurs, a famous and vapid television journalist with a knack for putting herself at the heart of every report.

In a dispatch from a war zone, she’ll invariably be scampering through the crossfire on camera, while at press conferences her questions are written with the express aim of going viral, rather than eliciting useful replies.

The film begins with a prime instance of the latter, as France and her loyal assistant Lou (Blanche Gardin) triumphantly swap lewd hand gestures across a crowded hall after Twitter goes wild for an empty gotcha she shoots at Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who appears via some cleverly trimmed archive footage.

Soon enough, though, another viral happening derails France’s ascent. While dropping off her 10-year-old son at school, she accidentally drives into a motorcycle courier (Jawad Zemmar), and the low-level gossip magazine story this generates suddenly makes her entire existence ring hollow. On-air panic attacks, a chaotic spell in rehab, a hot mic scandal and marital problems all speedily ensue. Even her signature glamorous outfits – the ones that catch the eyes of selfie-seekers in the street – feel increasingly like costumes.

France’s unsubtle title and sparky opening prime the viewer for sweeping allegory. But writer/director/seasoned-goader-of-audiences Bruno Dumont, of Hors Satan and Slack Bay, instead seems content to simply watch France flounder, and the pile-up of mishaps and traumas – culminating in a ludicrously overblown car accident – becomes so shruggingly businesslike that each one starts to feel like a joke at the film’s own expense.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

No cert, 134 min. On MUBI from Thursday December 29