IT'S AN EVENT when a new André Téchiné film opens. ...

hen a new André Téchiné film opens. Strayed (Les Egares) stars Emmanuelle Beart as a tense but arousable young French widow protecting her two children during the German Occupation. The film has commercial prospects similar to the current hit Bon Voyage, both being set during WWII. However, Téchiné's previous film, Loin (Far Away), about the secret complicity between French and Algerian immigrant workers/lovers, never got a U.S. theatrical release despite the relevance of its subject. Perhaps it was too disturbingly contemporary to pass off as an art-house fantasy.

Part of the trouble Téchiné has securing American distribution and sustaining U.S. critical support comes from his disregard for conventional movie sentiments. Always probing the psychological source of his characters' romantic fixations, Téchiné's movies necessitate that audiences reexamine their own. This approach can either excite or frustrate, depending on one's interest in the story set-up. Téchiné's stories are not clear-cut; they're circumstantial, musings. His filmmaking approach complicates what we think of as Hollywood conventions. For instance, Strayed follows Odile and her children on their June 1940 exodus out of Paris into the French countryside, but Téchiné's style is not plot-driven. Along the way of showing Odile's sojourn, his movie absorbs nature, analyzes social relations, observes symbolism and then-through minute concentration on these details-dares to depict mundane events as if dreaming.

That's a resume for great, original filmmaking. Yet Téchiné's name is less well-known than, say, Von Trier, Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Kieslowski or Tsai Ming-Liang because his methods are timeless, not fashionable. He's the last disciple of the French New Wave- unashamed of his cinematic legacy and determined to advance the love of movie style into modern social awareness. Art plus life. Most of the directors above pretend to be doing something new, which makes it easier for some critics and viewers to display hipster enthusiasm. But rather than pretend thematic novelty, Téchiné emphasizes his classical command of form (classical in the sense that by now we should be acquainted with the technical innovations the New Wave brought forth, e.g. Resnais' time/mental shifts repeated in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). From this formal elegance, Téchiné moves into tales that are politically and socially challenging. Some people see it, others misguidedly reject it. ^^^ It's easier to appreciate the standard topics of political resistance and artists' responsibility in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage. The safe distance of the Occupation makes those characters' dilemmas quaint even while the cast that includes Isabelle Adjani, Gerard Depardieu and Virginie Ledoyen performs the drama glamorously and Rappeneau directs with disarming swiftness. But Strayed goes beyond nostalgic pleasures and superficial platitudes. Téchiné takes on a wartime story as a chance to rework a Brechtian conceit. Wide-eyed, sensual Beart turns Odile into the most ravishing Mother Courage imaginable, but she's also a figure of absolute bourgeois propriety. Odile's primal instincts and class hauteur are contested when she meets Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), a feral youth encountered on the road who is also escaping. She is suspicious but entranced-so is her young son Philippe (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet). Téchiné relays their Frenchified ambivalence powerfully when Yvan sings-in German.

As in Téchiné's Algierian-themed movies (Les Innocents, The Wild Reeds, Loin), his characters awaken to the real-life difficulty of "common sense"; that's the ideological complacency that Odile and Philippe wrestle with and that Yvan struggles against. The wild boy (who may be crazy, or a spy) helps the family survive by breaking into an unoccupied country house where they can hide out; he also hunts and steals food. Odile commands the home, cooking and cleaning as if by second nature. (Beart scrubs windows with authority and conviction-the best idealization of domestic labor since Julie Christie ironing in Dr. Zhivago and Jeanne Moreau cooking in Téchiné's French Provincial. These aren't just beautiful actresses. They know how to work.)

In the red-brick manse with red wooden beams where our fugitives hold out, Téchiné creates the setting for a fable (vividly surrounded by sounds of nature). Such a stately home, set deep in the woods, feels ostentatious like the house in Giant; it's immediately symbolic. That's how expressive Téchiné's realism is. So when Ivan climbs to the highest gable and penetrates the house from the top down, something more than a physical edifice is being challenged. In the absence of patriarchal control, Odile and Philippe must rethink their ideas about power and law. Yvan's assuming of the man's role-through lawlessness and instinct-forces his own young-adult reassessment.

Using the Occupation as an outside threat, Strayed distills political awareness to the war between social influence and personal feeling. The French title Les Egares refers to those who venture out of established, institutionalized customs. That subject is rich enough to give the movie three protagonists. Odile, Yvan and Philippe are involved in a family triangle, each at different stages of emotional development. This multiplicity is a crucial element of Téchiné's artistry and may also explain why critics prefer the simple-minded diagrammatic fiction of Far from Heaven. Todd Haynes' didactic conceit never accounts for the emotional lives of subsidiary characters or children. Consider that when Téchiné's fugitives are visited by Resistance men who might, in fact, be collaborators, he makes the men's disillusionment part of the suspense. And Téchiné weaves Philippe's pre-teen awe into the film's psychological texture. The realization of Philippe's possibly gay consciousness-like the boy Jim's consciousness in Empire of the Sun-gives this period story immediacy.

Strayed opens with an outdoor scene of the Parisian refugees crowded on a road when German bombers attack overhead. It's Téchiné's deliberate invocation of Empire of the Sun, part of the way he uses generic archetypes to prepare an exploration of society's nonconformists. (Téchiné's 1986 Scene of the Crime began similarly, reenacting a scene from David Lean's Great Expectations, then becoming a study of its protagonists' rebellion.) The entertaining Bon Voyage wound up reducing its characters to types, but Téchiné defines his characters by idiosyncratic specifics: Philippe's lying and obstinacy, Odile's restless sense of duty and Yvan's purposeful enigma made intriguing by his short haircut and sullen manner (he resembles Matthew Modine in Birdy). Philippe idolizes Yvan, who is both intuitive and untutored; Odile teaches him to read. This entangles and changes her relationship from matron, mother-figure to lover.

Téchiné's complex, shifting perspectives are a hallmark of his ever-deepening narratives-and his splendid command of style. Strayed begins like a virtuoso, prestige action movie, then a daytime fable. After that, Téchiné shows a bed in the big house with sun-bleached white sheets and Yvan awakening underneath in red boxer shorts that repeat the color of the house's violated red beams. Cinematographer Agnes Godard proved she knew what to do with a light meter and a male body in Beau Travail, but in this scene she's aided by Téchiné's gift for altering a viewer's consciousness through purely visual means. The scene's brightness and discreet sensuality change the film's tone. From then on, this good movie works on a higher level. Politics plus eroticism.

Yvan shares an adventure of maturation with Odile and Philippe. Téchiné sets this in the past, during a turning point in French film consciousness, because his concern with subtly radical changes in the way his characters understand themselves matches his interest in their political relationships. A radio broadcast about lost children intercut with Yvan robbing a henhouse matches the documentary footage that provides historical context. This makes Yvan and Odile's consummated attraction something more than a love story. Téchiné's fluent technique addresses the full quandary of sexual relations. Man, woman and boy connect with each other and carry the memory with them.

BREAKIN' ALL THE RULES Jamie Foxx writes a how-to book on breaking up and finds himself stealing his best friend's woman (Gabrielle Union). Yeah, this romantic comedy is formulaic. But look at what writer-director Daniel Taplitz cooks up. Taking his cue from r&b love ballads, Taplitz plays around with the hurt feelings no one admits to except in song. It's sometimes vulgar, but those moments are also revealing. The able cast (including Morris Chestnut and Jennifer Esposito) exposes some serious soft spots-from Union wishing to look like Halle Berry to Foxx in a moment of unmasculine depression wearing a multicolored chenille bathrobe. He also does an original disquisition on why no one can bite through their own flesh. Taplitz goes beneath the skin of screwball comedies.