[2] The plot follows a widowed mother, who escaping occupied Paris with her two young children during World War II, finds shelter with an itinerant teenager at an abandoned rural house.

[2] In June 1940, as German troops are advancing on Paris, Odile, an attractive widow in her late thirties, joins the exodus from the city with her two children: 13-year-old Philippe and 7-year-old Cathy.

Odile regards this enigmatic scamp with overt suspicion, but Yvan charms Cathy and especially Philippe, who admires his rogue self-sufficiency and take-charge attitude.

As he goes inside, Yvan cuts the phone lines and hides an existing radio, before opening the door to the others, ensuring their isolation from what is happening in the outside world.. An almost idyllic peaceful life follows for the four refugees, away from the war around them.

The house is large and comfortable and as Odile soon discovers it was a country retreat owned by a Jewish married couple of musicians who left for abroad.

Her husband was killed recently fighting the Germans and she, a former school teacher, was ill prepared by the subsequent upheavals created by the war.

Knowing the countryside and its dangers well, he hunts rabbits and catches fish from a nearby river during the day; at night he makes excursions to retrieve objects from dead soldiers and provisions from abandoned homes.

Cathy enjoys his company and Philippe admires him as an ideal older brother, but when Yvan finds a gun and grenade, Odile hides it from him.

Jean Ramsay Levi of FIT productions had the idea to make a film from Gilles Perrault's short novel The Boy With Grey Eyes (Le Garçon aux yeux gris) published in 2001.

[3] Perrault's story was in many respects autobiographical, based on his own memories of the exodus from Paris in June 1940 when he, age nine, like Philippe in the film, had to escape to the south with his mother and his younger sister.

"[6] Dennis Lim, writing for The Village Voice, said that "As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy — a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.

"[8] In Variety, David Stratton commented that, with Strayed, "Techine creates a considerable degree of suspense with minimal ingredients here, and he has been judicious in his casting choices."

Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly gave the film a favorable review describing it as "beautifully ambiguous, exquisitely underplayed".