Serge Bozon’s La France is generic clusterfuck, but in the best way––a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost. It’s a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14 month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday.
Camille (Sylvie Testud) is living on a rural estate with an invasive sister when she receives a letter from her husband, who has been writing as faithfully as possible from his post in World War I. But in this missive, he tells her to move on, that she’ll never see him again. Convinced that he’s just confused and susceptible to the black magic of nightmares, that the war’s major side effect is simple distance and not total psychological recalibration, Camille sets out to get her man back. She chops off her hair, binds her breasts and heads out into the countryside in search of her love’s brigade. She soon instead finds another band of soldiers, and though she easily convinces them that she’s a desperate, orphaned teenage boy, they’re nonetheless afraid of a look in her eyes, which the lieutenant of the brigade is sure is a sign that this ruffian is “seeking death.” Camille eventually secures the tropps’ trust and earns the right to stay with them, and together they wander the countryside, ostensibly “looking for the front.”
The journey is long, and less than eventful, and as a lost soul with a dreamily sketched but ill-thought-out goal, Camille fits right in. The band kills time on the road swapping imaginings about the lost city of Atlantis, and singing variants on a French pop theme about a blind girl and her lover(s). Bozon recorded the songs live, capturing the less-than-professional voices organically stretching and cracking as the actors played along on shabby home-made folk instruments.
At first these musical moments––which unflailingly crop up before night falls and a certain anxious, almost hallucinatory madness creeps on to the screen––play as wonderful non-sequitors. Eventually, they start to tell stories that run parallel to La France’s primary themes. At one point, the feminine protagonist of the song (who is given voice by a variety of legitimately male soldiers, but never Camille) sings a lament to a lost boyfriend: “I promised a lover, a German who’s hard of hearing. The idiot doesn’t know France…who am I to judge?” Later, “she” swoons for a Polack: “I’d like France to be invaded by Poland/I can feel the pleasant vibrations.” If the colonialist fantasy is analogous to rape, this is its inversion: in search of a safe haven away from home, they’re fantasizing that they could submit to another country’s embrace. This longing resolves itself in the saddest of ironies when Camille discovers what’s become of her husband. She may have assumed a new identity in order to find him, but their parallel journeys away from home have transformed both into different people.
As much as Bozon’s vision has been praised for its startling originality, so has his choice of title come under attack for its “portentousness“, for being merely a “provocation.” Is this France––or was it? An empty space on which the lonely and lost draw their own impossibly romantic fantasies, only to wander towards inevitable disappointments with heads and hearts infected by the deceptively simple beauty of pop? In an interview with Mark Peranson for Cinema Scope, Bozon, a former film critic and active vinyl obsessive, admits to sourcing his “politics” from his pop preferences:
Just listen to “Going All the Way” by The Squires or “On Tour” by The Chancellors (two garage diamonds found by Tim Warren of Crypt Records) and you’ll understand the political meaning of my movie. I’ll try and explain: “On Tour” is a song (as you could guess) about the life of a group on tour. But, like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played once outside their own town. Now think about the “tour” of my soldiers… you see? You begin by expecting some light, uplifting pop, but in the end it’s only imposture, frustration, and anger all over the place.
Like the music in which the filmmaker finds his unlikely inspiration, La France’s grand, all-encompassing gestures of uplift are underpinned by an eventual awareness of their futilty. That tension, and the odd magic that comes out of it, is irresistible.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth