The Great Man

The filmmaker Sarah Leonor has a keen eye and a gentle, unassuming touch. In The Great Man, she discreetly changes moods and storytelling modes like a pianist sliding her hand down a short, soft glissando.

It takes a woman to make a great film about the all-male bastion of the French Foreign Legion. Claire Denis did so in her elliptical desert updating of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” in “Beau Travail” (1999), and her fellow French director Sarah Leonor nearly equals that feat in The Great Man.

With an acute style marked by lengthy tracking shots and crisp natural cinematography from Laurent Desmet (Shall We Kiss?), Leonor manages to convey emotions through purely visual terms.

It exploits the military aesthetics that lend themselves so well to breathtaking sounds and visuals without fetishizing them.

While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.

It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.