Kreikenmayer, Eric

Strayed

Emmanuelle Béart gives another beautiful performance in this fable-like story of World War II. She plays a widow with two children in tow; escaping from Paris, their car is bombed in the countryside and they stagger into the woods along with a rough, savvy teenage boy (the feral Gaspard Ulliel). Their idyll in an abandoned chateau takes up the remainder of the film, as various tensions simmer within this ad hoc family unit. Director Andre Techine (Wild Reeds, Scene of the Crime) is a master of the small, telling moment and the frailty of people in a natural landscape. He also proves, in the riveting sequence of Germans attacking the line of refugees, that he could probably make a great action film if he cared to. Along with Béart's sensuality, his treatment of hushed interiors and sympathy for the imagination of children creates an intimate arena for these lost souls. --Robert Horton

DVD extras include: 16x9 anamorphic, 5.1 sound, interviews with Andre Techine, Gaspard Ulliel & Gilles Perrault, subtitle control, storyboards, photo gallery. Set in 1940 at the beginning of France's occupation by the Germans, Strayed stars French film icon Emmanuelle Béart (Nathalie, 8 Women) as Odile, a young and beautiful widow fleeing Paris with her two children. When German planes bomb the road filled with refugees, Odile's car is destroyed and the three must escape into the woods. There they encounter Yvan (sexy newcomer Gaspard Ulliel - Brotherhood of the Wolf), a 17 year-old illiterate delinquent whose survival skills and charm soon prove indispensable. They soon take shelter in an abandoned house and become a makeshift family. Odile, at once suspicious of and attracted to the mysterious stranger, soon finds herself at the center of a fascinating set of personal and sexual dynamics. One of the most respected filmmakers in France, André Téchiné (Wild Reeds, Rendez-Vous) once again, builds on his reputation as one of the most sensitive and intelligent filmmakers working today.

Wild Reeds

This resonant, engrossing 1994 film by André Téchiné (Thieves) is an unusual coming-of-age story set at a French boarding school in 1962, when news of France's war in Algeria is still plentiful. Téchiné focuses on a handful of students, measuring their transition into adulthood against the reality of love, sex, and the war's controversial cost. Strikingly sensitive and sophisticated, beautifully dramatized, and perfectly acted by a young cast, the film feels like one of those universal touchstones for the final days of childhood grace. Téchiné's typically blunt-but-gentle manner is perfectly suited for this tale of youthful gains and losses. --Tom Keogh

Alice and Martin

At the age of 10, Martin is sent by his single mother (a tough, tender, joyful Carmen Maura) to live with his father, an industrialist with a wife and family of his own. Ten years later, the grown Martin (pretty, first-time actor Alexis Loret) flees his new home in a panic when his father dies, and he lives like a hermit in the hills before seeking out his brother (Mathieu Amalric) in Paris. When he meets Alice (the radiant Juliette Binoche), his brother's worldly, wary roommate, his puppy-dog obsessiveness and seductive but sincere tenderness slowly wins her over despite their age differences. But insular Martin keeps his own emotions wrapped up, even as he shoots to the top of modeling world, until his haunted past bursts out in a depression that threatens to consume him and Alice must reconnect him to his estranged family.

André Téchiné has delivered some of the most delicate character pieces in recent French cinema, most notably the coming-of-age drama Wild Reeds. Alice and Martin, authored with help from Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep), never quite comes together as smoothly as his best work; it ricochets from lovely romantic flirtations to tortured psychodrama to family melodrama while Téchiné's oblique, reserved direction observes without penetrating the heart of the drama. Loret's Martin is more enigma than character, but Amalric shows the same shaggy, understated charm he displayed in Late August, Early September and Binoche brings a sensitivity and toughness to the emotionally scuffed Alice. Her radiant presence gives the film its moments of emotional frisson a discreet, subtle power. --Sean Axmaker

Alice et Martin [Region 2]

At the age of 10, Martin is sent by his single mother (a tough, tender, joyful Carmen Maura) to live with his father, an industrialist with a wife and family of his own. Ten years later, the grown Martin (pretty, first-time actor Alexis Loret) flees his new home in a panic when his father dies, and he lives like a hermit in the hills before seeking out his brother (Mathieu Amalric) in Paris. When he meets Alice (the radiant Juliette Binoche), his brother's worldly, wary roommate, his puppy-dog obsessiveness and seductive but sincere tenderness slowly wins her over despite their age differences. But insular Martin keeps his own emotions wrapped up, even as he shoots to the top of modeling world, until his haunted past bursts out in a depression that threatens to consume him and Alice must reconnect him to his estranged family.

André Téchiné has delivered some of the most delicate character pieces in recent French cinema, most notably the coming-of-age drama Wild Reeds. Alice and Martin, authored with help from Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep), never quite comes together as smoothly as his best work; it ricochets from lovely romantic flirtations to tortured psychodrama to family melodrama while Téchiné's oblique, reserved direction observes without penetrating the heart of the drama. Loret's Martin is more enigma than character, but Amalric shows the same shaggy, understated charm he displayed in Late August, Early September and Binoche brings a sensitivity and toughness to the emotionally scuffed Alice. Her radiant presence gives the film its moments of emotional frisson a discreet, subtle power. --Sean Axmaker