"You interest me. You are very strict and yet so lost," a scruffy soldier says to Emmanuelle Béart's character about halfway through André Téchiné's "Strayed." It is one of those lines that sums up the appeal of a character, an actress, and a film very neatly, buried almost too deep in moment to resonate properly until it's all over. But the scruffy soldier is right: it is impossible to imagine this gripping refugee drama without Beart's paradoxical combination of confusion and strength.
The confusion is easily explained: it is 1940, and the Germans are taking Paris. Beautiful young widow Odile (Béart) takes her teenage son Philippe (Leprince-Ringuet) and seven-year-old daughter Cathy (Clémence Meyer) to join the stream of refugees south. When the road is strafed by German planes, they flee into the woods and meet Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), a fearless young drifter who helps them survive. They find an abandoned house, where they enjoy a respite from the troubles of war: they walk in summer meadows and boil chickens. But of course, the idyll can't last. While Philippe admires the resourceful drifter and Cathy catches frogs, Yvan harbors secrets, Odile has secret desires, and men in uniform roam the countryside.
As a serious companion piece to this year's sprawling refugee farce "Bon Voyage," "Strayed" is almost a chamber play (other films of the genre include Jan Jakub Kolski's "Pornography" and Schlöndorff's "Coup de Grace.") If it weren't for everybody's inordinate fondness for wine, the film could be set anywhere, at any time. Historical details matter less to Téchiné than universal human truths, which are carefully observed and superbly acted by the outstanding cast. In addition to Béart, Ulliel and newcomer Leprince-Ringuet give terrific performances in a film that mixes the reassuring with the disturbing, the strong with the weak, the bucolic with the gruesome.
