Film

The discovery of Cannes’s 2007 Directors’ Fortnight festival, La France is a World War I film that traffics in deliberate discordances. This exceedingly odd movie takes France’s most unconventionally beautiful actress, Testud, and dresses her in drag, casting her as a farm wife who goes searching for her husband at the front. She meets up with an ostensibly lost band of soldiers who not only accept that she’s a boy named Camille, but who—when the mood strikes them—spontaneously burst into song.

Like festival darlings Eugène Green (The Living World) and Albert Serra (Honor of the Knights), former film critic Bozon has absorbed the influence of Robert Bresson, rarely showing more than is necessary. And like Green, he’s a modern folklorist—this is a World War I fable that, by its very existence, calls into question how war stories are told, exploring the relationship between death and art. (If, to paraphrase the British WWI motto, it was considered sweet and proper to die for one’s country, La France emphasizes the sweet.) Occasional instances of violence register all the more powerfully against the minimalist backdrop. From its preposterously overbroad title to its impromptu, toe-tapping musical numbers, this is a movie that invents its own language. If it doesn’t all translate, that’s because it’s unique.