Reseñas de la crítica

A film of boundless empathy and a perfect companion to Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) above, Of Men and War is a spare, rigorously conceived, emotionally dense look at a California treatment centre for PTSD-afflicted veterans of the Iraq war... Years in the making, Of Men and War is a staggering achievement, a fusion of observational and therapeutic cinema and my pick for the best movie of 2015.

Of Men and War shows how watching and listening, how simply *being there*, can be overwhelmingly active, subtly radical, and for the men and their loved ones forever disrupted by experiences of war—in other words, a large percentage of us, spread between nations and over generations—potentially transformative.

Of Men and War's compassion is matched only by its relentlessness... Becue-Renard doesn't so much follow as drift, from person to person, sometimes from family to family. What emerges is a tapestry of despair, one defined by its persistence.

Filmed almost entirely inside the Pathway Home in California, a residential therapy center for veterans, this devastatingly raw documentary shows that for some the fighting may stop, but the suffering continues... Empathetic and rigorous, this second installment in Mr. Bécue-Renard's trilogy, "A Genealogy of Wrath" (the first focused on war widows), burns low and slow. It's not an easy watch, but it is an enlightening one.

Bécue-Renard's documentary presents a moving record of a side of war that is rarely rendered and a series of character portraits grounded in minute gestures as well as words.

Of Men and War is powerful, but not in a smarmy way designed to congratulate audiences on their presumable bravery for sitting through it — no reaction shots of a sympathetic interlocutor gravely nodding or heavy musical cues to signal pathos, instead diving into the sessions and never blinking. The camerawork is remarkably confident, literally taking a seat at the table and panning smoothly and slowly between the speakers and their hearers to actively follow the thread of discussion.

According to Bécue-Renard, he inserted a droning subliminal score in many scenes, underscoring the pre-existing tension between the soldiers while subtly heightening their chronicles of the atrocities of combat—an effect which may help account for both the film's felt immediacy and its lingering power.

A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, Of Men and War argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative. The second part of his "Genealogy of Wrath" trilogy (the first, War Wearied, followed three widows in the aftermath of the war in Bosnia), Laurent Bécue-Renard's film avoids the politics of modern warfare, maintaining a rigorous focus on past traumas and present struggles of its subjects.

Group therapy sessions, which are the emotional centerpiece of the film, seethe with frustration, survivor guilt, and despair; dark shades are worn indoors, and chair-flipping walkouts are not uncommon. But Bécue-Renard hangs on—as does chief counselor Fred Gusman—without pretending that all of the men will recover.