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100Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.
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91André Téchiné's beautifully ambiguous, exquisitely underplayed drama Strayed has less to do with the events and moral choices of the era that continue to shape French identity than with the timeless psychological effects of finding oneself unmoored from the familiar.
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90As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.
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90What makes this film special, as in his other films, is the getting there. Téchiné is the master of subtle shifts in mood, an acute delineator of psychological interplay, and therefore demands the utmost of his actors.
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90A taut, suspenseful, linear approach, and a trio of excellent performances.
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80Téchiné gets deep inside the dread and exhilaration of people who have lost their bearings so suddenly they don't even have the luxury of grief.
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80It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.
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80Elegant and understated.
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80Strayed has the strange clarity of a fable. It strips everything away until only instincts and emotions are left.
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75Begins and ends with facts of war, but it is really a film about the nature of male and female, about middle-class values and those who cannot afford them, about how helpless we can be when the net of society is broken.
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Techine's terrifying setup quickly gives way to a slower and less explicit suspense, in which every step and spoken word is heavy with intrigue.
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75The story is dramatic and Béart gives one of her best performances, even if Téchiné's style has its usual sense of distance.
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75War may set the stage for Strayed, but the film's real focus is something much quieter and internal: People caught in the throes of a transformation that is not of their making and struggling to adapt.
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75Béart, too beautiful for words, brings a complex swirl of emotions, elegantly restrained and marked with pain, to this finely wrought work.
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75A disturbing drama about the dehumanizing and humiliating effects of war.
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75Hardship and suffering don't drive this movie so much as a romantic's gloss on the two.
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70Long expert at unforgettable characterizations, Techine turns his talents toward creating an evocative sense of time and mood.
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70It's an impressive, intelligent, compact piece of filmmaking...But Téchiné might be one of those directors whose work is best appreciated by critics and other filmmakers.
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70Strayed moves forward with an absorbing ruthlessness, yet without sacrificing those tiny incidental details that lend it singularity and power.
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70Téchiné has a reputation in France as an especially empathic director of women--Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche among them--and he has understood this Odile very well.
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70French director Andre Techine (Alice and Martin) powerfully re-creates the mass exodus from the city and draws a fine performance from Beart as a woman struggling to shield her children from her own fear and confusion. Unfortunately the last act goes off the rails.
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63The result is, alas, competent but unexceptional.
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50Beautifully shot, and graced with another winning performance from the lovely Beart, Strayed nevertheless fails because the relationship between Odile and Yvan never makes us feel the sexual passion it implies.
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50Ostensibly a love story, the film is also handicapped by Téchiné's strong gay sensibility and clear lack of romantic interest in his characters.
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50The setup's a bit reminiscent of "The English Patient" -- except that Beart's much easier on the eyes and ears than Ralph Fiennes is -- but Strayed is even slower moving, if you can believe it.
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40There's no emotional weight to either character, or to this far-from-dangerous liaison. All you can do is watch the slight story sputter, and try to figure out whether Bèart's formidable lips were made by God or man.
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30A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.