La France.

"Serge Bozon's La France is a generic clusterfuck, but in the best way - a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It's a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it's a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14-month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday."

Meaning, of course, today. But there's good news for many outside New York, too. Northwest Film Forum has announced that it's acquired limited rights to La France and will be touring it around the US and Canada in "a progressive and unique new model of film releasing."

"There is something obviously discordant about this infusion of pop into the generally hallowed realm of the war movie, which greatly adds to the pleasure and mystery of La France," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Much like its expressive cinematography, which ushers you deep into the night, the film's impudent genre sampling - it begins as a woman's picture before morphing into a romantic war musical - is an invitation to boldness."

"The movie opens in May 1917, nearly three years into World War I," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "French farm girl Camille (Sylvie Testud) receives a letter from her soldier husband warning that she will not hear from and perhaps never see him again. That night, she crops her hair and sets off for the front in the guise of a 17-year-old boy. Her adventures are at once dreamlike and prosaic: Wandering in the woods, she stumbles upon an encampment of sleeping soldiers. Perhaps imagining that she is invisible, Camille lies down among them."

"As befits the work of a former film critic, La France is as much Bozon's ballad-like fable as it is his corrective critique of recent, WWI-set French productions (the film's pared-down intensity shames the manipulative bathos of Joyeux Noël and the visual blubber of A Very Long Engagement)," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "While Minnelli, Davies or Tsai would have used the songs as an escape for the characters from a dreary world, Bozon instead stages these numbers as inseparable from the film's dreamscape, where the ethereal and the brutal are engaged in a war of their own. Despite the portentousness of its title, La France remains a close and intimate work that sustains its singularity to the end."

"[Pedro] Costa may have lived with [Jacques] Tourneur in his work for a longer period of time, and as such displayed a deeply ingrained translation of the director's ambiance into socially and politically progressive poetics, but La France too proudly wears Tourneur on its sleeve," proposes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "[I]n La France's night scenes pools of luminescence miraculously light an entire errant platoon of French troops and leave them warm-blooded and thoughtfully cared after in this special kind of night vision, yet utterly vulnerable to, and almost anonymous in, the surrounding darkness. For it is when shadows start to close off the visible world, the one we think we see and therefore think we understand, that the film speaks of Tourneur's ambient terrors and atmospheric menace, the irrational spilling out of the inkiness and insulating our generic heroes and heroines even as its dark cushion suggests the awful unknown hiding in its folds - the war."

"In the movie's lengthiest monologue, Camille is taken aside by her fellow soldiers and told the story of one young private who went to war and lost his ability to dream," notes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "In almost any other war film, such an anecdote would seem woefully naïve, but in La France, the loss of one's imagination is considered the worst possible casualty of war."

"France has given us two of the most charmingly original films of the year so far, both of them fond, modernist interpretations of the musical genre," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine. "First was Christophe Honore's tale of young love in the city, Love Songs, and now Serge Bozon's WWI battlefield fable, La France."

Earlier: Mark Peranson in Cinema Scope and Craig Phillips here.

Posted by dwhudson at July 11, 2008 6:36 AM