User reviews

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.

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.

A curious little picture of fantasy that think was for the most part well done. Not super compelling or anything to rave about but completely watchable. Clearly not for everyone esp. those who need a more concrete narrative with absolute believability.

I aim the title at any who have seen this movie and had friends remind them that their mouth was hanging open as they viewed. To potential new viewers, let these remarks serve as a warning.

I will say that the musical element of the film was actually quite charming and wonderful in an absurd sort of way. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story line and initially contributed to our confusion. We soon abandoned all hope of understanding why anything occurred, but the musical interludes were always welcome.

Heaven forbid you are amongst a group or encounter others who feel the movie is worthy of analysis or discussion beyond: "What the hell was THAT all about?" It had some interesting moments, but since they never really contributed to understanding, I had to limit my rating to 3 stars.

I saw this with a large audience at the Seattle Int. Film Festival, a fairly sophisticated and accepting group of aficionados. Many still had mouths agape even as we filed out of the theater, as their disbelief and confusion was not easily overcome.

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.

I am just not sure what this movie was about, or if there was a point. We have this woman, Camille, who joins up with a band of actors dressed as soldiers in WWI in France. They wander around in very nice countryside that has not one hint of the war that raged and scarred the countryside in France. Time after time the group walks through fields and woods which are painfully obviously not affected in any way from war. The only time we get any idea that there could be a battle going on is when they are all in a boat and there are some sound effects and everyone ducks now and then. One other time they were in a small area where there had been a fire, but that area was very small. Where were the artillery-shell craters, the torn vegetation from small-arms fire,the front line? Where was any of it? I think the director was very lazy or broke and could not even simulate a war environment.

When Francoise appeared from nowhere that took the cake. He wanders across a field like a spirit. Nothing was settled. He wrote a letter at the beginning of the movie but that was not addressed.

Horrible movie. Waste of time.

That wanders aimlessly behind WW1 lines. Almost zero signs of WW1, No rations, No water, three sightings of Germans how did she get behind German lines? The woman faking kills a German lookout? WTF. And it gets even more cray cray after that.. Faker woman is/was going to the front to get her husband to desert. And best goof was cadet shot found floating down the river to next scene completely dry. Or the random meeting husband escaped from Belgium prisoner of war camp..

the different image of war. heroic but in special form. cruel in a profound sense. but, more important, delicate portrait of love, duty, sacrifice and happiness. the grace. to present the small details of life, without victories or fight scenes. to use symbols and vulnerabilities of characters - only ordinary people. to use each level of story for image of fragile, vulnerable and beautiful universe, a woman and few men in middle of strange events, the emotions are only tool for define the sense of existence, the frame of hope. more than a film, a splendid poem . one of the rare pieces who do not has ambition to impress. only create seed for reflection.