La France.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

At 35, Serge Bozon has already lived through several incarnations: film critic, actor, DJ, writer, and filmmaker (L'Amitié, Mods). It's that diverse sensibility that gives his WWI-set film La France an oddball charm, a quiet, naturalistic even sensual war drama with musical interludes; it's as if Claire Denis and Jacques Demy had a film together.

The story is a simple one: Camille (Sylvie Testud, Fear and Trembling) receives a mysterious letter from her husband, who's off fighting for France. The letter suggests that he's dead but a hints, too, that he may be alive. As a woman, she's not allowed to leave her village, so she chops her hair short and poses as a young man to go off in search of her missing love. She soon encounters and blends in with a regiment led by a soft-spoken but firmly-in-command lieutenant (the great Pascal Greggory) and becomes their sort of unofficial mascot as they move toward the front lines - but are they really moving toward the war, or away from it? The film is about camaraderie to be sure, and has an oddball pace to it that is not like any other war film. At times poetic and sad, other times joyful and even transcendent, it doesn't really pack many dramatic punches, so when the moments do come they are all the more shocking.

Testud (Fear and Trembling; Murderous Maids; La Captive) is perfectly cast, mesmerizing, almost never smiling. Even though she can be uniquely beautiful, she has a deadpan, boyish face that makes you believe that these soldiers would buy into her ruse.

And those musical sequences, four of them in all, are certainly lovely, even if they begin to get a bit repetitious. The songs have a modern pop sensibility very far removed from the period depicted in the film, but these multi-layered harmonies somehow work, even more because they are sung off-key by the cast themselves (who at least pantomime the playing of seemingly hand-crafted instruments).

If I had mixed feelings about the inevitable ending, I nonetheless found the denouement moving. La France is also beautifully shot; one particular standout for me is a haunting scene in which Camille is circled menacingly by the men, only to disappear like an apparition into the moonlight. (As an aside, Bozon stated in a Cinema Scope interview that the film was shot using "a film stock never used before to shoot a movie, Kodak 5299, which is usually used as an intermediate film in numerical post-production." This explains the "aquarium feeling" of the film's night scenes.) And there is an unforgettable scene set in a barn, which is a burlesque of tragedy in one long take of violent acts. It's hard to shake.

La France kept me a bit at arm's length emotionally, and yet is full of moments of rare beauty and poignancy. It's a curious hybrid that magically works, and I'm glad it found its way to DVD in the US.