[Here's my old post]

Strayed (Les gars) starts out with Odile (Emmanuelle Bart), a beautiful young widow, dodging German bombs on her way out of Paris along with her two young kids. The year is 1940 and the German occupation of France has begun. When an air-strike forces them to leave their car on the road, help comes unexpectedly in a form of a wily youngster named Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), who's aware of the situation and has something to offer to the bourgeois family he's just saved: survival skills. After breaking into an abandoned house they try to resemble a makeshift family.

Sounds simple enough, but thats Tchin for you. The outside war is just an overture for him to isolate his characters and then map out their internal feelings for each other. Odile is initially leery of the uncivilized Yvan, and tries to regulate him using various methods not knowing that the situation at hand is causing her to gradually lose control herself. In the meantime, her older son Phillipe (Grgoire Leprince-Ringuet) starts seeing a father figure in Yvan who has helped them through this ordeal.

Andr Tchin has always been a master at economically depicting the struggles of his characters whether they're about class, sexuality or simply survival, and as I mentioned earlier, especially in isolated settings. In his masterful 1984 effort Wild Reeds, it was the lonely dormitory which served as the site for his youth to activate their personal wars while the French/Algerian war raging on far from it; another prime example would be in Loin where the isolated route between the two continents served as a emotional hybrid for his two protagonists. 

Tchin mentioned in an interview about the film that "The war is present from the beginning of the film. It is the root of the story. It haunts the film. Archive images resurface. The characters are fleeing from this war, and its from the moment where they lose their bearings entirely that I felt ready to follow them in their adventure on film. The place they move into becomes a sort of desert island where they are like the first or the last or the only people on Earth. How will they manage to live together?" 

Strayed premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2003 (in-competition). It went on to garner 4 Csar (French Oscar) nominations, including one for Claire Denis' DP Agns Godard, who brilliantly creates a lush and calm look to the film which rightfully serves in contrast to its growing unrest. Andre Tchin has worked with Miss. Bart before; it was in the little seen Jembrasse Pas (I Dont Kiss), a film in which the filmmaker poetically explored the fragile psyche of his star just like he does in Strayed. And Bart is up to the challenge with her exquisitely nuanced performance.

The DVD of the film was released on November 23rd (2004) by Wellspring.