La France

Serge Bozon's La France (2009) is one of those films cited in film magazines as evidence for the resurgence of something like the French New Wave -- a wave that is periodically sighted every ten years or so and doesn't ever quite reach shore. La France is baffling but not obscure -- you can always follow the narrative but why exactly the film's plot takes its various twists and turns is inexplicable. A gamine heroine, lonely for her husband, hikes from her small village toward the Western Front -- it is apparently 1917. Disguised as a man, she encounters a small platoon of infantrymen who promptly fire on her, shooting her in the hand. For the next eighty minutes or so, with the soliders, she wanders around a picturesque landscape , something like Courbet's limestone valleys and hills. The platoon, for complex reasons, is regarded as having deserted from the French army and so the film's narrative exploits a double-chase: the troops who are trying to reach Belgium have to hide from both the French army and the Germans -- sometimes, we see a few lonely Germans, Uhlans on horseback, and an unfortunate guy stranded in a watchtower that the heroine knifes to death. The plot's premise spares Bozon from staging any expensive battle scenes and precludes any spectacle -- whenever, the platoon sees troops on either side they vamoose to the boondocks. Basically, the film is figures in a landscape that is, more or less, pretty -- there's an impressive scene where the protagonists float down a river past a pitted battlefield in the dark (the dark hides the low-budget set and effects, I suppose) and lots of images of people walking through hedgerows and autumnal forests. Three members of the platoon get killed in various ways and, unexpectedly, the heroine's husband, who was (unbeknownst to us) imprisoned in a POW camp, limps into the path of the platoon to supply a happy, deus-ex-machina ending. The husband makes love to his wife and, then, looks out the window where he sees three bright stars that he identifies with three of the platoon members killed in the film -- exactly, how he knows about them or how they died is unclear; the heroine is sleeping at the time. There may be some faint suggestion that the whole narrative is his fantasy, but if this is true the clues are so faint as to be indiscernable. (One scene is staged very much like the French-Roumanian version of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge that was a staple of the old Twilight Zone). The most puzzling aspect of this film is that...it is a...musical! Sort of. About five times, the platoon members suddenly reveal primitive musical instruments and tunes, complete with harmonized singing. The songs all have to do with a "blind girl" but otherwise have completely elliptical lyrics that seem more or less nonsensical. The songs are like an interpolation from a Monty Python movie and completely destabilize the picture making it unclear what the director intends or, even, what emotional tint we should invest in watching the film. It feels desperately "thin" -- as if the cheap, low-budget plot and the lack of incidents would result in a film less than an hour long, hence the padding with the songs. I suppose some sort of Brechtian Verfremdungs ("Alienation") effect is intended. But it doesn't work and the songs are just irritants.