IMDb:
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)This played at the Cannes festival in official competition in 2003. It's currently playing in limited release in North America (released May 14).
The actor to watch for here is Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet. His character is 13, but I'm not sure how old he actually was when the film was shot. Hard to find good pictures of him too. But he was nominated for most promising male newcomer when the film played in Cannes.
Check out the official website, which includes video excerpts and the trailer (all in French).
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)Here's a review from some website.
Les Egares/Strayed (France)
There are faint echoes of Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" in Andre Techine's "Les Egares" (Strayed), a compact, occasionally intriguing wartime drama about a widowed schoolteacher and her two children who flee Paris during the German Occupation and find refuge in a secluded, abandoned home.
Based on the French novel "The Boy With Grey Eyes," by Gilles Perrault, the film basically eschews big battle scenes and huddled masses in favor of a more intimate, low-key storytelling approach.
The result, while effectively acted and nicely shot, doesn't exactly break new ground or turn any heads in a way that summons the Palme d'Or, but given the festival's lackluster start, it's a step in the right direction.
The always reliable Emmanuelle Beart is an entirely credible Odile, a newly single parent who is struggling to make the right decisions for her wise-beyond-his-years 13-year-old son, Philippe (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), and 7-year-old daughter, Cathy (Clemence Meyer), as overhead German Stukas drop bombs on the throngs of fresh refugees attempting to make an exodus from the city.
Leading them out of harm's way is a lone teenager (Gaspard Ulliel) with a keenly honed survival instinct, but while Philippe is eager to follow the enigmatic Yvan's lead, his mother doesn't exactly have a good gut feeling about the youth.
Still, she agrees to take temporary shelter in a large country home that has been hastily evacuated by its owners. Surrounded by dense trees and a well-stocked wine cellar, Odile and her now-extended family soon become comfortably ensconced in their remote hideaway despite the growing tensions, both sexual and otherwise, between her and the teen with the mysterious past.
Like the title character in the Polanski film, Techine's protagonists spend a good portion of the picture both physically and emotionally removed from the more visceral aspects of combat.
Here, however, Techine and co-writer Gilles Taurand are obviously more concerned with the little psychodrama that mounts between Odile and Yvan than with atrocities. After that early, unnerving bomber plane attack, the war is played out offscreen, serving as a backdrop for this contained tale about an invasion on the domestic home front.
While some might complain that it's a bit of a cheat as far as war films go, Techine's visuals are given an authentic boost by Agnes Godard's extensive use of richly fertile natural imagery.
Composer Philippe Sarde's remarkably spare musical fragments, meanwhile, are called upon only when necessary to heighten the mood, offering sound proof that less is definitely more.