A short review of Strayed (Les égarés), which I saw recently at the London Film Festival.
This thoughtful French film covers the flight of a French family from Paris. It stars Emmanuelle Beart and is directed by Andre Téchéné. It picks up their journey when they are in a refugee column in the fields in the south of France. The seeming mundane journey of stops and starts is shattered with the attack of a German plane strafing and bombing the people exposed on the road.
The depiction of the carnage is quite stark, yet matter of fact, people get hit by bullets and die, or blown into the air from bombs. The fear and suddenness of the attack is immediate and powerfully felt, you can sense the panic of the crowd waiting for the second pass. The main protagonists run into the fields to escape once their car and possessions are destroyed.
In their escape from the road they are aided by a young man Yvan, who guides them to a safe place in the forest. The film comes into its own here depicting the tension between the mother, Odile, played by Emmanuelle Beart, her young children, a boy of 13 and a girl of about 7 or so against the young man, Yvan.
Beart tries to hold the family together in the manner she might have in Paris, ensuring that manners and respect are held too, yet she is quite challenged by the effort of maintaining her poise and the arrival of Yvan.
The film explores a range of issues around liberty vs freedom, the family find a house to holdup in and this almost becomes a prison.
The difference between being a child vs being an adult and different levels of responsibility and understanding that this implies is a persistant undercurrent in the film, many of the tensions and decision points in the film revolve around challenges to Odile.
There are further issues in the film which are shown those of dislocation and dispossession due to the war and how this affects those involved and from this you can gain a sense of the movement along a normality to freedom tp madness axis that the characters are taken. This is in essence as they are in a non-normal situation and must react to the situation the best they can, then normality starts to reasset itself.
A wonderful film with many layers and interest to it. I'd happily watch it again, as the acting and photography is delightful.
The film will be available from Amazon.fr, soon.
