FRENCH FILMS STAMPED for distribution are almost uniformly armed and ready to disturb these days. François Ozon veers from nasty to naughty, while his collaborator Marina de Van applies sharp implements to viewer empathy. Gaspar Noé opts for body-to-body brutality – or, failing that, whatever blunt object is at hand. Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy didn't get a chance to stimulate and simulate here, so she's upping the pornographic ante. Last but not least, Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms foregrounds the current shock-and-awe brigade's relationship to Hollywood sensationalism and Washington might by placing its explosive violence in the desert of California: specifically, location-scout and armed-forces terrain. Where does the barrage of bloody weapons and erect penises (prosthetic and otherwise) leave a filmmaker like André Téchiné, whose new-wave roots now seem classicist? His last feature, the Wild Reeds semi-sequel, Far Away, scarcely dented festivals, and a superior side project, the Mohammed Mrabet-based Beach Café, went ignored. It appears star power, the ingredient that once assured a French director art-house audiences, is now Téchiné's last commercial resort. Strayed showcases Emmanuelle Béart, last seen mocking Catherine Deneuve's propriety in Ozon's 8 Women. The same formidable screen presence Ozon caricatures, albeit with rare affection – namely, a sensuality that isn't too delicate for hard work – Téchiné perceptively enhances. As Odile, a mother who flees to the countryside during the war-torn summer of 1940, Béart is one-third of a typically bent Téchiné family romance: dodging German bombs, both she and her adolescent son (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) are attracted to an outlaw teen (Gaspard Ulliel) who guides them through the forest to a home away from home. An early scene captures a civilian's-eye view of military might as potently as Roman Polanski's The Pianist, but subtler verities emerge from the wreckage; in comparison, the recent resistance drama Bon voyage isn't as politically acute or as timely. While The Lost Ones is a more direct translation of the film's French title, Les égarés, the awkward Strayed fits Téchiné's ever restless queer and querying portraiture, which – aided by estimable cinematographer Agnès Godard – is masterful at revealing nature, human and otherwise. (Johnny Ray Huston)