Critic Reviews

Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.

André 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.

A taut, suspenseful, linear approach, and a trio of excellent performances.

As 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.

What 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.

Téchiné 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.

Elegant and understated.

It 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.

Strayed has the strange clarity of a fable. It strips everything away until only instincts and emotions are left.

The story is dramatic and Béart gives one of her best performances, even if Téchiné's style has its usual sense of distance.