“The Italian Straw Hat” and “La France” on DVD

How the long-lost silent comedy "The Italian Straw Hat" is like an extended episode of "Seinfeld."

Serge Bozon’s “La France” (2007) is another kind of French irreverence — a modestly budgeted, sincere-on-its-face WWI trek (and Prix Jean Vigo winner at home) that incongruously, but charmingly, becomes a musical at unpredictable intervals. The always-trimly-androgynous Sylvie Testud stars as the young farm wife of a soldier at the front, and when she receives a cryptic letter telling her to forget about him, she cuts her hair, dresses as a man, and launches out to find him. Quickly, she attaches herself to a squad of wandering, grieving soldiers, led by soulful officer Pascal Greggory, whose trudge through the leafy landscape seems incidental to them compared to the grief they carry for fallen brothers and the battle-forged bonds that hold the crew together.

And then the singing starts — the songs are jaunty ‘60s-style pop ballads, performed by the soldiers on improvised instruments in the wilderness, and they seem to suggest a separate narrative, involving a narrating “blind girl” and burbling about abstracted trials and lovelorn redemptions. They’re showstoppers, written and arranged by the French retro-pop-orchestral group Fugu, and Bozon films them the way Clair shoots comedy: straight on, with a serene gravity, all the better to appreciate the actors’ amateurish but earnest crooning.

The movie is something of a fitful dream that gets a littler odder as it progresses; a ride down river on a raft is a bold quote from “The Night of the Hunter,” and if you’re not sure yet how to feel about Bozon’s wanderers and their musical asides, then you know. (Such is the upside of cine-literacy.) Testud’s innocent finds her husband (the late Guillaume Depardieu) eventually, but the fallout is nothing we might’ve guessed at.

“The Italian Straw Hat” (Flicker Alley) and “La France” (Kino Lorber Films) are now available on DVD.

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