La France (2007) Reviews

• Lost souls skirting the field of battle

  Chris Knipp2008-05-03

  This peculiar musical war movie about a woman disguised as a man in search of her soldier husband in World War I France has the courage of its oddball convictions--or does it? It was disconcerting, at least, to hear from director Bozon that his original intention was a film about Arabs in the French-Algerian war of the Sixties. For a French art film you need public money, he said, and to get that the dialogue has to be in French--so voila!--no Arabs, and the dial was turned back to WWI. 'La France' is the kind of thing that truly delights some of the most ardent festival attendees: a film that's genuinely weird and original, that comes from left field, is quite sure of itself, and is sustained by some of the best actors in its country of origin, good cinematography, and unusual music used in an unexpected way. To others, this is likely to seem merely remote and inexplicable; a long slog even at only 102 minutes. To me, it evoked memories of Robert Bresson, or the Eric Rohmer of 'Percival,' while still seeming a cluster of missed opportunities. Opening in France last November, it received a respectful critical reception and the occasional rave. It also ran in Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films series early this year and was singled out for special praise by the Village Voice's Nathan Lee. Bozon and his scenarist, Axelle Ropert, deserve credit for following their own path in constructing what French reviewer Christine Haas called "a melancholy ballad and a humanistic fable." Here's the premise: a young woman gets a strange letter from her loving husband at the front: "Stop writing me, you will never see me again." She cuts her hair, binds her breasts and, posing as a seventeen-year-old boy, joins a unit whose members she finds sleeping in a field. Of course they try to get rid of him/her, but "Camille" (Sylvie Testud)--she can use her real name, because it's a boy's as easily as a girl's--each time does something so risky and dramatic (gets shot in the hand, jumps off a bridge) that they have to rescue her and keep her in tow a while longer. Eventually her initiative saves them, and she's accepted, even though the Lieutenant (Pascal Greggory) has declared on her first appearance that he/she has the face of somebody who's "seeking death." The surprise is that the essential unmasking will be not of Camille but of the unit she joins. Guillaume Depardieu comes in for an appropriate cameo at the end looking suitably hopeless, pretty, and shattered. Good use is made here of Testud's androgyny and Greggory's habitual hangdog look. This scrawny, determined "Camille" really resembles a boy, while the Lieutenant's soft, sad visage hints at something very wrong. Every so often--and this is what the film will be remembered for--the soldiers take out a bunch of handmade junkyard musical instruments and in unprofessional but harmonized falsettos sing a Sixties-style ballad, which is always from a woman's viewpoint--and has, by intention, absolutely nothing to do with the action. Bozon claims that it's a Hollywood tradition and not purely his avantgardism to make war movies with songs that are anachronistic and not plot-related. The resulting effect, anyhow, lacks any sense of the actual, without slipping over into a purely conceptual or fantastic framework that might have given the themes of loss, loneliness, failure of nerve, and sexual identity (or whatever all this is about) really free rein. Camille is an interesting character with rich picaresque possibilities that are insufficiently explored. Testud seems to give so much, yet get back so little from the film. Greggory's sick-soul character never develops or changes. The other soldiers never take on real personalities. The essential mechanism of most war movies--the sounds and effects of battle--is absent. Instead, violence comes from an unexpected quarter. The resolution is bitter-sweet. Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008. It won the Prix Jean Vigo in France for independent spirit and originality of style.

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• Frank, sad, genuinely romantic, very WWI

  tushania2012-01-20

  I am extremely surprised at most of the reviews submitted here. It is as if the Americans are really as our (stupid) stereotypes paint them: unimaginative, uneducated, dull, practical. Questions spring to mind: would they enjoy "The Little Prince" by Saint-Exupery? Would they say that it's silly? Did they ever read or heard a poem of any kind? Did they ever read Remarque or Dos Passos or saw Deer Hunter or anything good? Did they literally took apart every fictional movie or book they saw by the criteria of factual consistency, realism and strict adherence to genre? I really, really don't understand people that criticize a movie about war because there were not enough explosions or bomb craters in it. I refuse to believe that they never had seen a good movie about war without action heroics (we certainly have, Soviet cinema did a lot of nice and gentle (and popular) dramas and humane comedies about war). It's like criticizing a comedy for the lack of good old-fashioned clowns in it. And most of all it surprises me that even the social context doesn't push them in the right direction. A couple of guys here saw the film at an art-house festival. I imagine that they would be OK with the most absurd and gory things if someone put a "trash" and "experimental" and "surreal" stickers on the poster. But war films, they are about tactics and M1s, right? I think the musical numbers in the film are the most beautiful part of it: they set the tone for the lengthy and disjointed dialogue about Atlantis and whatnot. They are obviously efficient at 1) bringing out the sensitive in young soldiers without heaping macho melodrama; 2) exploring the androgyny of a soldier (an interesting theme); and 3) just evoking the "war is a silly, strange place to be for all of us, but were are here" Vonnegut kind of feeling. I wonder if other reviewers read Vonnegut.

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• A musical about a company of soldiers during WW I

  rasecz2008-04-06

  I would not have watched this film had I known it was a musical. Not my genre. There are only four songs and they are mercifully not too long. They were recorded live while shooting and the compositions have an odd unpolished quality. It's 1917 in northern France. A company of eleven French soldiers, including a lieutenant, are moving through the countryside. A woman impersonating a man succeeds in joining the company. While the mission of the company is not immediately revealed, the woman is on a quest to find her husband, also a soldier at the front, whose whereabouts are unknown. The film is taken up by the journey of those twelve characters. The war is near but battles don't make it to the screen. You may see some smoke, hear the sound of cannons and explosions, and see a few dead bodies. The war is context but it's depiction is not central. The stress is on the men of the company and the interloper they have adopted. The musical numbers are surreal interludes. Out of the blue makeshift instruments appear, mostly string, a piano once and a clarinet. Obviously the soldiers are not carrying them around. It's fanciful and it rubbed me in the wrong way.

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• the strangest war movie you will ever see

  LudwA2011-06-06

  I'd just finished reading J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, when I watched this movie, and they seemed to make a good pair. This is one of the most unusual war movies I've ever seen. There's no war/battle action at all! Even more so, the soldiers seem to have been wandering around, aimlessly, for years and years, in a desperate attempt to deal with their experiences in The Great War. Trying to make sense of the horror, by telling each other stories of the mythical Atlantis and singing songs. It's hard forgetting the pain and horrors they endured though (and that's what made me think of Salinger's depressed post war heroes). The group of soldiers traveling through endless dark-green and misty blue woods (apparently without ever reaching a village) is joined by a woman, played by Sylvie Testud, posing as a young boy, Jean d'Arc-style. For a long time it seems her secret will never be revealed, which fits the mood of the movie. The others are too lifeless (spiritless even) to notice she's a woman, even when they are dressing her wounds. Another good example of the beautiful alienation of this movie already takes place in the first scene. We see Sylvie Testud, standing on a hill close to her home, staring in the distance, hoping to see the front line of the War probably hundreds of kilometers away. (as if such a thing was possible, like a miracle). The woman receives bad news in a letter, and starts her journey, eventually meeting the soldiers, who grumblingly let her join their group (even though the woman pays a 'handy' price). The soldiers almost immediately tell her she can never really become one of them, and never does she join the group in their musical intermezzos. Yes, there are a handful of sixties influenced psych-folk songs, played by the soldiers on self-built instruments (even a piano, God knows where that came from). And why not? Everything is possible. Every time they play a new song, the mood seems to gets even sadder and more beautiful. Fine movie.

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• Yentl Come Home

  writers_reign2007-12-27

  Don't see this if there are no subtitles and your French is sketchy at best to non-existent otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out if it's a fantasy or what. It's 1917 and the war is in full spate. In the North East of the country Sylvie Testud gets a Dear Jean letter and instead of murmuring philosophically, c'est la vie, c'est l'amour she chops off her hair, finds a pair of pants and lights out for the front to ask the guy who done her wrong just what he thinks he's doing. Before long she runs across a raggle-taggle unit led by Pascal Greggory, tags along and winds up with a uniform - they just happened to have a spare in her size as you do - but no gun and becomes part of the group. They march, and march and march some more but strangely enough in the middle of a major war they never run into any actual fighting though they do hear gunfire on one occasion. Even more bizarrely they keep breaking into song, complete with an quintet/sextet of soldier/musicians at a time when one would have thought discretion would dictate silence. Eventually Testud's errant mate shows up, they put in some sack time - in pajamas yet, presumably from the same quartermaster's stores that laid the uniform on Testud - and the group moves on leaving them to it. It's actually a beautifully shot and engrossing film a sort of hybrid of Yentl, Victor Victoria and A Very Long Engagement. Sylvie Testud is clearly brave enough to play a role in which she is seen as androgynous whereas she is actually a very lovely and very feminine actress and she works well with Greggory although virtually all the actors turn in fine performances. Not really multiplex fodder but no worse for that so if there's an Art House near you lobby them to book this.

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