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.
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One of my favourite films of the past few years is on BBC4 this Saturday. They have a short preview of the film on their site, which is part of their regular international film season on Saturday evenings.
I really enjoyed time-out, or L'emploi du temps as it was known in France. I think the french title is better, the emphasis on filling in time is more apt. I have found that has continually returned to my thoughts. The essence of the film is the balance of your identity versus the identity you gain from having a job. The main character of the film loses his job and attempts to cover by doing the same things each day. He has always enjoyed the driving and this starts to become his solice. He pretends that everything is fine and gradually he drifts into a different more desperate world, yet the parallels with his business man existance are still there, which is the disturbing undercurrent of the film. It is maybe a different take on the fragility of routine and civilization explored in Lord of the Flies. The mood of the film is quite empty and dark, but dramtically scored and shot, this seems to make his isolation even more stark.
Elements of the film keep coming back to me from time to time, around travelling and the question of what am I doing when things seem interminable. How much of you is your job is an interesting question, especially given the number of people who I know who have been made redundant over the past few years, including myself. Through the film you can start to see how people end up long term unemployed, being unemployed becomes your job.
If you miss the film on Saturday, you can always buy it from Amazon, Time Out (L'Emploi du temps), in French, with English sub-titles.
I'm off to the London Film Festival later this month, having fought with the ticket booking website last Thursday to get some tickets bought. There should be tickets left for many films, but we were being allocated edge seats already.
I'm going to see five films, including the Surprise film, Strayed, One for the Road, Northfolk and A Real Man. Short reviews of each film after I've seen them.
There are so many films that this literally is a mere scrape of the surface. If you are in London, then go see some films. Again, like Borough Market this is something I should have been to years ago.
I saw dirty pretty things, which is a great, sad thoughtful film. Essentially the underside of immigrant London, full of cash in hand temporary work and a feeling of desperation and some hope. I think that this is one of my films of the year, so far. It also made me realise how little what I impacts people who share the same streets as me, as one of the film's characters says "you have never seen us before because we are invisible, we clean your toilets and drive your cabs."
It made me think of several other films like "Timeout" or properly L'emploi du temps, a film about a frenchman who loses his job and pretends not to, it follows his gradual drift away from reality, he becomes hooked on the travelling aspect of his job, not wanting to get off.
Also the film set in Margate called Last Resort from a few years ago, following the life of a recent Russian arrival who claims asylum and gets sent to Margate with her son, when her English boyfriend fails to show up.
All these films show the edge of consumer society or look up at it from the position of no job or no places in society.
Buy Dirty Pretty Things, Last Resort or Time-out from amazon.
