Les égarés

A journey of a woman with her 2 children accompanied by a young mysterious wanderer who tried to flee the war, but the tragic will somewhat jostled against this bucolic experience.

An intimist French film that typically depicts the emotions and mixed and complex relations between the protagonists.

Pictures are nice, actors are moving but with a dull script and so little stake, the films fails to catch you completely. Though slow, the film is never boring, it is very pleasant to watch.

The film leaves you charmed and confused, you would love to like it, but it definitely lacks appeal..(6 out of 10)

A powerfully suspenseful film about how war tears lives apart, nearly destroys them, and then, amazingly, forces them to survive together. Set in gorgeous French countryside, beautifully acted and magically tense, the film is a strong reminder of man's beastial treatment of fellow humans. Redemption occurs while limited and lustful love develop. The point is in the mystery of people's behavior and its unpredictability. The lead actors, Beart and Ulliel are outstanding and memorable. As you might surmise from the opening scenes of wartime refugees in France, this is not a set up for a happy ending. But it is a profound story and a moving experience.

"Strayed (Les Égarés)" can't quite decide if it's a grittily realistic World War II drama or one of those let's-set-up-a-plausibly-extreme-situation-and-see-how-humans-react games.

The believable set-up of a widow and two children amidst frightened refugees fleeing Paris in 1940 is reinforced with intercuts of black-and-white newsreel-type footage. The second act in an isolated farmhouse with a helpful teenage boy suspiciously strains credulity, but the acting, particularly by Emmanuelle Béart, convinces us to accept the exploration of humanity.

But the arrival of retreating soldiers just confuses the bifurcation as it overlays both genres such that we just don't understand the characters' motivations in the climax, whether as realism or metaphor.

As in writer/director André Téchiné's "Alice and Martin," there's a final coda that adds new information on a character to change your perceptions. The novel it is based on does not appear to be available in English to see what he changed from the source material.

It is also possible Téchiné is making points about French political history, of which I was only able to pick up a few of the references as I know little about Vichy France, such as the house they are squatting in belongs to a Jewish musician who clearly will not be returning and the son's example of cultured singing is a German lieder.

The cinematography by Agnès Godard is beautiful.

Odile, a schoolteacher war widow flees Paris with her 13YO son and 6YO daughter as the German army advances upon the city, and on the way she coldly rejects a wounded soldier's desperate pleas for a lift. Later, when the column of refugees are strafed by German fighters and her car is destroyed, they are rescued by a strange crew-cut young man, Yvan. Recognizing his talent for survival, the helpless mother and children attach themselves to him. They all move into a large abandoned house that he discovers in the remote countryside, whereupon the illiterate Yvan scavenges for food by trapping rabbits and stealing chickens from distant farms. Odile lies to her children to protect them from the horrors of war, but continues to distrust Yvan for his suspiciously obscure origins. Techine seems to portray each member of this displaced family selfishly engrossed in their own need, perhaps intending them to represent the fragmented French nation itself. When Odile asserts herself as the matriarch of this family, grudging bonds of affection begin to form - but the balance is upset when the outside world finally intrudes on their pastoral idyll, and the characters contradict their earlier behavior in strangely inconsistent ways. The resourceful Yvan's mysterious background is eventually revealed, only for Techine to impose an especially counter-intuitive destiny upon him. "Les Egares" is beautifully shot and is never less than absorbing, but the characters' emotional detachment becomes an obstacle to intense involvement in their story.

Plots dealing with human relations taking place in closed environments are not easy to show on screen - even if the background is challenging and characters have to develop. In spite of catchy and versatile beginning, the events later, especially mansion-related ones, seem protracted at times, although there is more dynamism than statics. The romantic link is not evolving sufficiently, and it's climax is somewhat peculiar.

Luckily, all major performances are good, including the children who provide realistic approaches, not difficult to achieve sometimes... But when the credits appeared, I had to admit that I had expected more, since it was a French film, and the French are usually vibrant and spirited, but the overall atmosphere was more like a Dutch or Scandinavian one. Or were the war-time Frenchmen all so depressed and torpid?