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Strayed

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Set during the German occupation of France during WW II, "Strayed" (Les Egares) is a quiet, subtle film directed by the estimable Andre Techine and brimming over with valid psychological insight and emotional awareness.
"Strayed" tells the story of a widow (Emmanuelle Beart) fleeing Paris with her children: she's prim, proper, a school teacher used to a particular middle-class sense of decorum and restraint, who comes upon an unsettling, "natural" young man (Gaspard Ulliel) who lives by his wits and exhibits an intense knowledge and intuition of how to survive.
It is 1940, the Germans have taken over Paris, France is in disarray, yet these scared and wary people bond together: each one learning things from the other that don't come naturally to either of them. They find a safe place in an empty villa, once occupied by a Jewish couple and therein all four set up a home.
In many ways then, "Strayed" is about the Universal conflict between the Natural and the Ordered Life and to Techine's credit, one does not win out over the other. Instead, these characters find a place in their hearts willing to compromise, accept their differences and find a kind of love motivated by desperation and survival.

Two great things about 'Strayed' are Emmauelle Beart and Gaspard Ulliel. Perhaps Beart is more famous than Ulliel, but French cinema fans remember Gaspard Ulliel in 'A Very Long Engagement' in which he played the love of Audrey Tautou's heroine. Compare the two characters he plays, and you will know that he is a real thing, a real talent who is on the way to an international fame.

As to the film itself, 'Strayed' is set in 1940, the earlier days of German occupaton in France. Based on a novel "La Garcon aux yeux gris," the film is about a widowed teacher Odile (Beart) and her two children, who escape from the attack by a German aircraft in the quiet forest. There they meet a 17-year-old boy Yvan (Ulliel), and the four characters seeks for a temporary haven in a deserted mansion among the woods, where the time has stopped eternally.

Now it's not hard for us to anticipate what we see in this short film (about 90 minutes). Despite the differences, the relations between Odile and Yvan get more emotional as the story unfolds. But Techine doesn't stop there, for the two children of Odile (one boy and one girl) are looking for something from Yvan, who, to them, is a superior being. All these tensions are expressed, or suggested, in the seemingly quiet, episodic story. Everything is understated, but it is surely there.

[SUPERB ACTING] Without Beart and Ulliel, 'Strayed' could not be as good as it is. Fans of Emmanuelle Beart, who resented the misuse of her beauty in 'Mission Impossible' (like me), should watch this. Her excellent acting gives a life to the nervous character of Odile. And Ulliel literally becomes Yvan, a curious blend of street-smart wisdom and childlike innocence.

'Strayed' is the second colaboration of Techine and Beart (the first was 'J'embrasse pas' made in 1991). One good thing about Techine's films is that he shows the best side of the leading ladies, and 'Strayed' is no exception. My only complaint is that 'Strayed' should be better with a longer running time. After watching this film second time, I still find the ending too sudden and disappointing. Well, but I know, you may feel differently.

The fact that 'Strayed' is a French film might make you feel this is just another tedious, pretentious, European art-house nonsense that you cannot understand, but say that you do understand. No, that's not true. Techine doesn't despise mysteries and melodramas, and you can watch 'Strayed' as well-made love romance, with authentic feelings about the people and the place. As such it is first-rate.

STRAYED is yet another of those tender French films about survival and discovery under the duress of World War II. Based on the novel 'Les Egares' by Gilles Perrault and adapted for the screen by Gilles Taurand, STRAYED is an elegantly honest tale of a small family forced to evacuate Paris during the Nazi invasion and how that disruption in their lives ultimately enhances their view of the world.

Odile (Emmanuelle Beart) is an educated mother of two children, Cathy (Clemence Meyer) and Philippe (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), who has been teaching school and raising the dignity of her family until the war disrupts everything. During a blitz Odile hurries Cathy and Philippe into her car and drives out of Paris to the South to escape the Nazis. Her car breaks down and is burned and in a moment of desperation a young illiterate lad, Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel) from a reformatory offers his help and assists Odile and her family in finding refuge in a deserted country estate. Odile is at first cold to Yvan, but as the children warm to him, and as Yvan captures food for their table, Odile softens, no longer looking at this illiterate young lad as someone beneath her, and begins to teach him how to write and read.

Yvan keeps his past a secret, maintaining a mystery about himself that makes him all the more appealing. In time Odile succumbs to her physical attraction to Yvan and this warmly extended 'family' enjoys the beauty of the French countryside and new home...until the war seems over. Gendarmes visit the house, arrest Yvan as being an escapee from a reformatory, and because Odile and her children are illegally living in another person's home, they are moved to a refugee camp.

The manner in which this story pummels to an end is tense and tender and as directed by Andre Techine, the lessons of living, loving and surviving war are fully explored.

Odile is probably one of the beautiful Beart's finest roles, matched in sensitivity only by Gaspard Ulliel's finely wrought Yvan. The cinematography is breathtaking and the musical score is supportive without disrupting the flow of the film. Highly recommended on every level! Grady Harp, March 2005

Despite its WWII setting and frightening opening sequence, STRAYED ("Les Egarés") is a quiet and pastoral film. The movie concerns itself with a small family holed up in a chateau with an oddly self-reliant teenager named Yvan. It's a blessedly small story, and frankly, not much happens. (I repeat: Not much happens.)

This is not a criticism; intimate mood pieces are fine by me, leaving the viewer at leisure to evaluate the acting performances. Though at first she seems a cipher, I was impressed by Emmanuelle Béart's acting. Only having seen her in "glamorous" roles before, I was impressed by her ability to look pensive and melancholy in a role where she is uncertain of her place in the scheme of things. The lion's share of dialogue belongs to her son and Yvan, with a daughter thrown into the mix seemingly as an afterthought.

Anyway, at one point a visiting French soldier tells Béart that she needs to snap out of her dreamland. That's how I felt watching this movie; it was a very pleasant dream, but its plot had no momentum and could be interrupted at any point without ill effects... and then returned to again.

SIDELIGHT: The DVD's cover is strictly for marketing; this is by no means a torrid love story.

This film by French director André Téchiné is set in the summer of the civilian exodus from Paris during the invasion of the German armies at the start of WWII. Viewers expecting to be informed by a recreation of historical events will be disappointed, as this film has other things on its mind. Instead, it becomes a psychological study of a war widow with two children who falls under the influence of a mysterious teenage boy as they take refuge from aerial strafing in an isolated, empty house deep in the wooded countryside. In many ways, the time and place are unimportant; it could be just about anytime, anywhere.

The young man keeps food on the table by snaring rabbits in the woods and tries to gain possession of a confiscated gun, the mother's young son tries unsuccessfully to win his friendship, and two French soldiers spend an overnight at the house. Meanwhile, erotic tension slowly builds, though there are at least fifteen years between the widow and her young protector, and the film takes a long time deciding whether to consummate it. Eventually, the reality of the outside world intervenes and the story resolves itself as the mystery of the young man is at least partly solved. Slow, but with a few unexpected revelations. The DVD includes interviews with Téchiné and the author of the novel on which the film was based.

I have picked this movie up at the library the other day because it looked pretty good. When I was done watching the movie I realized that it wasn't what I really expected.
First I like to say that I like the fact that the main characters are cut off from the rest of the world which makes the movie more present, like something that could be happen here and now. Most of the time you don't get the usual distraction of local color - costumes, old cars, etc- to show that this really is the past. Personally it does get quite annoying at times when movies use a lot of sepia coloring or historical allusions like famous news radio broadcasts so that you can't forget for a moment the distance between then and now.
Moreover I think this movie fits into a trend of recent studies of history. A lot of books or documentaries on historical events stress the importance of understanding individual experiences to get a glimpse of the big picture. This is the first time ever seeing these actors and actress of this film. The children performance I thought was phenomenal. The plot and the direction of the film was great but I felt that it could have been more, I'm not too sure if the director's films are mostly made that way or that his preference.

One of the main reasons I was disappointed on this film is that I thought it would have lots of passion in it, but it wasn't release until the end of the movie. I don't know maybe I set myself up on this one. The cover made it seems as though the movie was filled with passion from beginning to end.......boy was I wrong. "Strayed" just left me hanging. Secondly the movie was way too short and incomplete. I didn't like the fact it ended abruptly like that............what's the rush man? I needed more.

Other than that, it's a well French cinema, which is the kind most film critics leniently praise precisely for wandering. You've got a storyline leading nowhere at times, characters discovering nothing so that nothing important happens. The pictures are usually nice and.....uh.... there's a little sex to thank you for waiting. Then it's over and you wonder why you wandered into this film.

"Strayed" is a well made movie that gives an authentic feeling and creates an intimate arena for these lost souls but unfortunately the film didn't quite reach my needs.

There are some films that are absolutely flawless...and I count this movie among them. I was stunned at how good this picture is. First of all, think about the movie allegorically. Here we have a 17 year old juvenile delinquent (Yvan) - an illiterate actually - who possesses more toughness, common sense, courage, even generosity than the French men in uniform (whether soldier or policeman). I felt that Andre Techine was telling us that if France had more men like the young Yvan, then the nation would not have suffered the national disgrace and humiliation of losing the war in 41 days. The soldiers were content to save their skins, accept confinement under the Germans, and go on with the lives. Yvan - on the other hand - refuses to accept confinement on any level.

I wanted to address another issue, raised by another reviewer, Grady Harp. I disagree with his opinion that Odile, the beautiful widowed mother, engages in an intimate relationship with Yvan because she grows to have a physical attraction for him. I see it differently. In the absence of her husband who just died in the war and in the confusion of leaving Paris, Odile is totally uprooted. Yvan - who dutifully brings food for the family and who assists in finding shelter for her children - is a replacement for her husband. Later, when the soldiers arrive, she is very uncomfortable with the men in uniform. In that short period, Yvan disappears. When he reappears, Odile is so relieved that the sexual union starts from nervousness and relief. Only during the act does she discover, to her own astonishment, her pleasure...a pleasure multiplied by the fact that she is giving Yvan the only gift she can, which is herself.

Both Emmanuelle Beart and Gaspard Ulliel gave amazing performances. One small detail... Ms. Beart was "dressed down" for the part. I thought that was most appropriate. Compared to a film like "Casablanca" where Ingrid Bergman is "dressed up", the director of "Strayed" tells his story of French refugees with far more credibility.

"Strayed," ("Les egares"), (2003), is a French war drama/romance, about 90 minutes long, filmed in full-color in the mountainous Castres, Tarn, in the beautiful countryside of that nation. It is set during the climactic days of World War II, directed by Andre Techine,(Wild Reeds,Scene of the Crime). It is based upon the novel LES EGARES by Gilles Perrault.

In June, 1940, Paris is falling in slow-motion to German soldiers as they advance on the city. Odile, played by Emmanuelle Beart, (Manon of the Spring, Nathalie,8 Women), is a widowed schoolteacher whose husband was killed early in the war. She is drawn into the panic surrounding her, so she packs up her car with everything it will carry, and with her two children, joins the exodus from the city. Philippe is on the cusp of adolescence. Little Cathy knows only that they are going south. After the family has spent many slow-moving hours on the overtaxed roads, a German plane attacks the refugees. There is great loss of life. The terrified Odile's car burns; she and her children lose everything. Then a shaven-headed 17-year old local youth, named Yvan, who seems to have escaped from a local institution of some sort during the panic, appears from nowhere. As played by the young Gaspard Ulliel,(Brotherhood of the Wolf,A Very Long Engagement), he leads the small family away from the carnage, to the safety of a lovely house standing empty during the war. Yvan seems to be well able to live off the land, and to provide for the little family he has found. Odile and Yvan are cut off from the rest of the world, living in confined quarters; they find their sexual desires awakening.

There's a scorching sex scene between Odile and Yvan -- it's probably the film's best known. The unusually interesting extras on the disk include interviews with director Techine, and the young actor Ulliel, in which Techine reveals how he hesitated about including the scene in the finished picture. Ulliel discusses the difficulty that ensued as two naked actors tried to film it. One thing's for sure, it required a lot of bravery on his part, and even more on Beart's, who is known for her bravery in that regard -- she filmed several unclothed scenes in MANON. And, luckily, she's still gorgeous while evidently in her thirties.

The disk's extra features also give us an interview with Perrault, author of the underlying book, which makes clear that the novel is based upon his own life experience - the story feels like felt experience. In June, 1940, his mother fled the city of Paris with his nine year old self and his younger sister; his family, as resident in the city's chic 16th arrondissement, would, however, have been better off financially than the family that the movie portrays.

Realistically speaking, war stories cannot turn out happily for everyone, and this one doesn't. Still, it is an extremely particular, resonant story, set in lovely surroundings, told in a tender and intimate manner that is likely to stay with you for a good long time.

With all due respects to Techine and the stunning Emmanuelle Beart, who plays Odile, the sad, siren of a mother trying to survive another tragedy, the last portion of screenwriting, of this otherwise fine movie, is a hurried mess.

Synopsis; Fleeing Paris during WWII from the Germans, a mother and her 2 children hook up with a mysterious, young man(Gaspard Ulliel, I liked him in "A Very Long Engagement") who seems to know his way through trouble. They hold up in an abandoned but beautiful home in the country unsure about their fate.

Most of this movie is captivating. The character development under the looming cloud of wartime terror drives the interest as they find a temporary serendity; the children actors are very good, and we care about their outcome.

Contrary to the cover, there's very little sex in the movie. Suddenly, near the end of the flick, they throw in a quick, poorly timed, weird, ho-hum, love scene. After so much care building the suspense and the relationships, they rush off to the ending, slam-bam. And it's a dud. "C'est la guerre!" One might say. Ok, but we were left scratching our heads wondering if they ran out of money.

I don't really know what to say other than that this is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. Gaspard Ulliel (Hannibal Rising) was excellent as Yvan. Emmanuelle Beart was also wonderful.