La France (film)

Synopsis

During the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud), a young woman whose husband is away fighting at the front, receives a short letter of break-up from him. Distraught, she decides to join him, but is driven back by the rule of the time which forbids women to move around alone. She has no other recourse than to dress herself up as a man so as to be able to take to the road on foot.

Reception

Tim Palmer argues that the film is an example of recent French pop-art cinema, in which mainstream or conventional materials (here, the war film, which Bozon described in interview as the last remaining classical genre in France today) are intermingled and hybridized with intellectual or esoteric designs (such as in Bozon's approach elements of the musical, stylized or watered-down Brechtian alienation devices, deliberate fissures in the logic of the film).