Fort Buchanan

What begins as a sideways comedy-drama with an unexpected setting and story gradually devolves into random pointlessness in filmmaker Benjamin Crotty's surreal tale about male and female spouses of French soldiers stationed in Iraq. The left-behind husbands and wives live at the fictional Fort Buchanan, where they revel in a hazy world of erotic tension and temptation, turning toward one another for release and, sometimes, fights. Among them is Roger (Andy Gillet), whose husband of 18 years is serving in the French army. Roger's daughter (Iliana Zabeth) is lurching toward an imbalanced adulthood in which she slugs her dad at will, is easily seduced by men or women, and makes protests when family connections are used to get her into a good university. But it's the strangeness of Fort Buchanan's sexual culture that gives Crotty's script and cinematic environment its bizarre, rule-bending atmosphere, which bears some resemblance to the loose, anything-goes values of camp life in M*A*S*H. For a while, Fort Buchanan is vaguely reminiscent of game-changing early works in the 1950s-‘60s French New Wave, although it ultimately fails to deliver a completely compelling tale. A strong optional purchase. (T. Keogh)