This is not your great-great-grandfather’s musical-romance-cross-dressing-World War I movie. Serge Bozon’s enchanting, unfathomably lovely “La France” (2007) is an eye-widening successor to the proletarian urges behind the eye candy of Jacques Demy’s musicals like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “A Room in Town.” Sylvie Testud (“Murderous Maids,” “La vie en rose”) brings her ethereal, waifish qualities to the fore as a wife fearful for her husband’s life who cuts her hair and secrets herself among soldiers at the frontline. The spare visuals, tending to abstraction and suggestion (the war is more heard than seen, ominous in near distance), have the rigor and economy of Bresson, and, as LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas noted from Cannes 2007, the sudden appearance of production numbers sung to 1960s-style Brit-pop, which sounds oafish yet soars, suggests the Beatles at their poppiest. The effect should be anathema, but in fact, it’s genuinely moving, quietly delirious and ultimately indelible. Pascal Greggory plays the kind leader of the pack of men (and woman) led into the worst of war. Sight & Sound editor Nick James put a few good words together recently that apply neatly to this daft, endearing, inspired singularity: “a fresh strangeness.” Yes, that’s “La France.” With Guillaume Depardieu. 102m. (Ray Pride)
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