The Search directed by Michal Hazanavicious and running 149 minutes was no exception the only question is whether this French Georgian film about the 1999 second Chechen War is worth the protracted seat time.

Hazanavicious obviously wanted to follow his hugely successful silent hit The Artist with something as different as possible. The result is definitely different but unfortunately much less successful.

According to the credits the film was inspired by the 1948 drama of the same name directed by Fred Zinnemann about a boy who becomes separated from his mother after liberation from a concentration camp in Germany. The film revolves around the relationship between the boy and an American soldier in the ruins of post-war Germany. Hazanavicius has updated the story to 1999 Chechnya and the American G I has become a Russian soldier while the search has become a search of a sister for her brother.

The film opens with a brutal scene where Russian soldiers shoot a Chechen couple in a village while a young boy, their son Hadji, looks on. Hadji flees the village together with other refugees and eventually ends up in a refugee camp where he meets ups with a EU human rights commission representative Carole played by Berenice Bejo who takes the traumatized boy under her wing. The traumatized Hadji refuses to speak until an hour and a half into the film and Hazanavicious is at his best working with the expressions of the mute boy. Meanwhile Hadju’s older sister older sister Raissa played by Zukhra Duishvili is searching for her missing brother.

The film also introduces us to Kolia, a young 19-year-old Russian played by Maxim Emelianov, is rounded up a taken into the Russian army where he undergoes a brutal boot camp training that includes hazing and beatings. The process is intended to turn the hapless Kolia into a brutal soldier ready for the battlefront in a dirty war.

Hazanavicious shot the film almost entirely in Georgia and he is at his best when portraying war scenes, military training, burnt out buildings and the oppressive brutality of war and the human suffering of the refugee camps. The director brought with him much of the same team that shot The Artist and the film is very professionally made and the colours and landscape as lensed by Guillaume Schiffman reinforces the story. The director is much less successful with his rather preachy humanitarian aid workers who lecture the audience on how people must care and must make a difference.

The film is rather one-sided also and would have benefited from at least showing something of what the war was about with the Chechen terrorists fighting in the region and blowing up innocent civilians which was why the Russians brought military force into this region of Russia in the first place.

Unlike the original 1948 film which brought understanding to the desolation of post-war Germany without preaching to its audience Hazanavicious could have delivered his message better with a much less heavy handed approach.

Credits: The Search (France, Georgia)

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

Cast: Berenice Bejo, Annette Bening, Maxim Emelianov, Zukhra Duishvili