Serge Bozon announced himself as a filmmaker to watch with his remarkably original debut feature, which combines the war film and the musical. After receiving anguished letters from her husband, a soldier’s wife disguises herself as a man and goes off to the battlefields to try and find him. The film seems suspended in a kind of twilight between day and night, life and death, violence and peace, where French soldiers fleeing the carnage express themselves in song.  “The menace of war is unceasing, or even eternal. To be more precise, La France is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, so I could have set it in the present. But I wanted, from a historical point of view, to deal with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917.”—Serge Bozon