Educational Media Reviews Online

In France in 1917, a young wife receives a letter from her husband, a soldier in WWI, telling her not to write him back and that she’ll never see him again. Prevented by the town authorities from trying to find him because of her gender, she cuts her hair, dresses as a boy, and sets out for the front lines. Falling in with the remnants of a small regiment, she strives to keep her identity a secret while also looking for her husband.

Calling this drama a film about World War I is a bit like saying peanut butter is the same thing as a peanut. There’s a basic relationship, but the film is entirely character drama, acted out against a backdrop of an almost unseen war. There are no battles; the young wife never even sees the front lines. She and the regiment she meets walk through fields and forests, following the lieutenant in charge of the group. They pass a mass gravesite, go through a supply trench, and even have to deal with a German lookout soldier, but there’s no “fighting” and, in typical French fashion, the war is mostly a stand-in for the fears and trials of the soldiers. Camille, the young wife, is played colorlessly by Sylvie Testud; while her story ostensibly drives the narrative, it is really the lieutenant, played by Pascal Greggory, who is more interesting.

As the film develops it’s arc can be guessed at long before the truth is revealed: the remnant of the regiment are all deserters, trying to avoid the front lines entirely and make their way through France and Belgium to Holland. At various points, the soldiers bring out various instruments, some of them homemade, and sing 1960s-style folk songs from the perspective of a young, blind French girl. The songs, while obliquely about Camille, feel totally out of place in the film; though it’s an interesting trope, it ultimately doesn’t help tell the story. A flatly unbelievable ending occurs, reuniting Camille with her husband. If the film itself tended towards surrealism or even magical realism, the whole thing would’ve gone down better, but minus the anachronistic musical numbers, it’s a straightforward, realistic drama, with a fair helping of the stereotypical existential navel-gazing French cinema often contains. Another potentially successful avenue for the film would have been to truly engage with the First World War and share some insight about it, but this too is a missed opportunity. While the pacing is well done and some of the characters fascinating, in the end La France provides little memorable storytelling.