The Wanderer

This is one of those rare films that stays on your mind for years, even though you might not remember much about it anymore. I saw this in 1998-only once-but sometimes find myself thinking about it. I remember walking out of the theater right after I saw it and feeling different than I did two hours earlier. Aside from Alain Fournier's excellent story, I think the film just conveys a particular mood really well--you feel affected and somewhat hypnotized by the movie. I can't say that I've had that experience very many times. I have tried to find this film on VHS several times over the past few years, but have not been successful (although I see that Amazon might have, at one time, offered it). Anybody with information on how I might obtain this amazing movie, please let me know.

I saw LGM in French with subtitles (and two years of high school French!). It felt like a pleasant dream (visual, ideas), and I remembered it quite well -- but I had forgotten the title. I described it to a French friend several years later, and he named it for me right away. If I see it advertised for a theatre again, I'll definitely go, now that my French is a little better and my appreciation of fantasy much enhanced.

Filmed in cinemascope, and making full use of the aspect ratio, watching this film is like being immersed in another world. For much of the first quarter of the movie, we're at a strange party at a country house, and very little in the way of dialogue is spoken to explain things. We are simply there, and the camera prowls through the crowd and around the house and grounds, and we follow, seeing what it sees, and trying to piece it all together. It's a bravura opening, and the film stalls a little afterwards, until it once again establishes its rhythm. It's a tale of a young man, wandering, searching for a path in life, and the constantly mobile camera expresses his wanderlust, just as the beauty (and sometimes strangeness) of the shots expresses his amazed and youthful eye on the world. It's too bad that this film is not available in its original, uncut length, indeed that it's totally unavailable anywhere (except, perhaps, France?), because it is a hidden treasure. Anyone who cares for the art and craft of movie-making should watch this film. Not only is it expertly made, it packs an emotional punch too. It's not to be compared to the novel, because film works differently. But the spirit of the book is intact, and the translation into visual terms is as stunning as the original prose.

If you know the book, the film is the fair answer to yours expectations. For performances, off course, for cinematography- just seductive- , for the grace and for the atmosphere - dreamy , delicate, seductive in profound sense. But, more important - it is magic. And this word has many senses in this case. Because it is just a film who you feel it as seed growing up, decades , in yourself , as memories. So, just special, memorable and so near to a personal experience.

The commentator who found only technical perfection in this film, but for whom a spark was missing, obviously hasn't lived with this masterpiece as I have, since it first appeared in 1967. I went to it the first time with the friend who had introduced me to the novel some years earlier, and we were both sceptical that it would be anything but a pastiche. At the end, we were both staring at the blank screen, tears rolling down our cheeks, certain we had seen something greatly out of the ordinary. It's a wonderful novel, the greatest French novel of the 20th century, and the film succeeds brilliantly in capturing as much of its magical and romantic atmosphere as could be expected. Seeing it again on DVD – though I've seen it many times in between – I find myself assailed by the same emotions. More than that, I am impressed by just how modern it feels. So many films from the 60s seem technically less fluent nowadays, but Le Grand Meaulnes seems as though made only yesterday. And where would a modern director find his Yvonne de Galais. In Maria de Medeiros, perhaps, but even she could hardly surpass Albicoco's Yvonne. What a plot, what performances, what a perfect adaptation.