Claire Denis sublimely explored the sweaty, dust-coated bodies of French legionnaires in one of her best movies, Beau Travail, which focused on a platoon of lonesome fighters marooned at a remote outpost in East Africa. In Our Men (Mon légionnaire), the second feature from writer-director Rachel Lang, we get to see the other side of the action, watching how these soldiers’ distant lives are felt back home by the women and children waiting around for them to return from their missions.
Subtly told, with plenty of documentary-style details revealing the extent of Lang’s research and experience (the director herself is a former French soldier), the story focuses on two families coping with the fleeting relationships that professional military careers demand. On the one hand there’s the squad captain, Maxime (Louis Garrel), and his wife, Céline (Camille Cottin from Call My Agent), who’ve been in a long-distance marriage for years and have managed, with difficulty, to raise their young son. And on the other there’s the new recruit, Vlad (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a Ukrainian immigrant whose fiancée, Nika (Ina Marija Bartaité), has followed him all the way to Corsica, where the Legion’s 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment is stationed.
Our Men cuts between Maxime and Vlad as they’re quickly deployed to the deserts of Mali, helping the French army fight a wave of Islamic insurgency, and Céline and Nika as they maintain households whose stabilities are tested by their husbands’ absences. The tension of the film, which comes and goes like the legionnaires themselves, arises less from scenes of pure drama than from how the scenes tend to ricochet off each other: the more the soldiers are drawn to the fight abroad, the more their emotional intimacy is drained away, leaving their wives to fend for themselves.
While there’s nothing new about this scenario, which has been around since at least The Best Years of Our Lives and was most recently seen in the British dramedy Military Wives, the fact that Lang chose such a unique army as the Foreign Legion lends Our Men an added layer of interest. Legionnaires are less like regular soldiers than members of a military cult with its own distinct traditions and rituals — some of them are featured in the film, including marching songs whose lyrics can be either patriotic or downright silly — to the extent that Maxime and Vlad are increasingly unable to act normally when they’re off-duty, as if they can never wash the Legion off their skin.
If Céline has decided to accept this reality, working as a successful lawyer and managing things on her own, for Nika, who’s literally fresh off the boat and only speaks spotty French, being alone in a strange land is much harder to handle, especially when Vlad remains coldly distanced from her while back on leave. Marija Bartaité, who starred in Sharunas Bartas’ Peace to Us in Our Dreams, captures Nika’s plight in quietly moving ways, revealing how much her character is willing to shut her mouth and go with the flow — until she hits a breaking point that upends her marriage, with tragic results to follow.
Lang’s debut, the admirable Baden Baden, had a tone at once offbeat and despondent, whereas here it’s mostly the latter as we watch the two couples come apart under the strain of multiple conflicts. Cinematographer Fiona Braillon chronicles the unraveling with realistic flair but doesn’t shy away from the beauty of the settings, whether in shots of armored transports racing through a desert bleached white by the sun, or the light at dusk as it hits the Corsican coast. Those images recall the lush textures of Denis’ movie — as does a cameo by Beau Travail co-star Grégoire Colin, who plays the regiment commander — but Our Men is really about something else: the way war always manages to find its way to the homefront, making each day a battle to be won or lost.
Director: Rachel Lang
Screenplay: Rachel Lang
Cast: Louis Garrel, Camille Cottin, Ina Marija Bartaité, Aleksandr Kuznetsov
Producers: Jeremy Forni, Benoît Roland
Cinematography: Fiona Braillon
Production design: Jean-François Sturm
Costume design: Catherine Cosme
Editing: Sophie Vercruysse
Sound: Aline Huber, Philippe Charbonnel, Charles de Ville
Production companies: ChevalDeuxTroix (France), Wrong Men (Belgium)
World sales: Bac Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In French, Ukrainian, English
107 minutes
