Léa Seydoux in France (Kino Lorber)

A life of Parisian glamour, celebrity and adventure, shot through with tragedy, comeuppance, and death. Should make a fabulous movie, right? Director Bruno Dumont casts vivacious French star Léa Seydoux as the eponymous news anchor France de Meurs, who comes to terms with fame and a chaotic life in a narrative that borrows from classic women’s pictures with their twists and turns. Only intermittently, though, are we taken with the story and its heroine. Despite occasional—and sometimes seemingly random—moments of excitement, France is a sluggish, disjointed affair.

The movie opens on a daring note with France challenging French President Macron before a packed hall in a scene cut together with press conference footage. France screws up a catlike pout for the camera, and Macron seems taken aback by her question. It’s hard to tell if this setup is supposed to portray France as a clever provocateur or just to twit the French news business with a touch of satire, of which the movie has plenty. France mocks her mobs of fans with “buck-buck” chicken noises alongside her perky assistant (trending French comedienne Blanche Gardin), puts herself at the center of news stories, and manipulates naïve subjects off camera in a war zone to produce results on-screen. Quel choc! Numerous scenes of selfie-seekers stalking France reinforce the sense of celebrity as a trap.

Against this sour backdrop, France broods over a dissatisfying domestic life with her diffident son (Gaetan Amiel) and grasping husband, Fred (Benjamin Biolay, looking like Al Gore with Bob’s Big Boy hair). A cascade of events shakes her life loose in a pattern that should be startling, except they just sort of roll over one after another with little lasting effect: an incident where France accidentally hits a poor immigrant with her car and attempts to make amends over the victim’s family’s star-struck protests; her impulsive decision to quit the news business and then rejoin it; France’s hookup in the Alps with a young man who turns out to be a creep, and her weepy how-could-you response to his betrayal; episodes that make France look like a poseur or worse on air.

For a top-ranked reporter, France sizes up situations in a non-strategic fashion, gets bamboozled easily, and misses the irony in being trapped as her journalistic wiles have trapped others. Other characters can go astray and make us feel for them, but we’re not really feeling it for France. Director Dumont doesn’t seem to like her much either, forcing Seydoux to race around in the field dodging bombs like Jiminy Cricket. The actress does her best to play a sprawling role, but seems confused by the role’s unmoored emotional shifts.

As her assistant quips after France’s latest scandal du jour: “People will hate you, then adore you—it’s all the same.” It would have been a guilty pleasure to hate France, exciting to love her, but this long and confusing movie did not move us to do either one. So yes, it really was all the same.