‘A Very Long Engagement’

One of this film’s great pleasures is the atmosphere Jean-Pierre Jeunet creates with imaginative storytelling and camerawork.

By: Bob Brown

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Audrey Tautou searches for her fiancé in World War I-ravaged Europe in A Very Long Engagement.


   At nearly two and a quarter hours, A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) is a moderately long slog, especially if you lack French fluency. Fortunately, I attended this film with my wife, a Francophone, so I got to the laugh lines a little ahead of the pack, who were still struggling to keep ahead of the subtitles. Not being a speed reader, I’m afraid I spent more time than I would have liked using those training wheels for the Gallic-impaired. It’s frustrating to miss all the richness going on above the type.
   Not that there are many laughs in this bittersweet epic, based on Sébastien Japrisot’s 1991 novel about the futility of war and the constancy of love. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet had long wanted to film this work, ever since he read the book. But he couldn’t imagine who would play the heroine, Mathilde, until he met Audrey Tautou, who won audience hearts in Jeunet’s Amélie (2001).
   Mathilde is a young French girl, hobbled by polio from an early age, who is engaged to her childhood sweetheart, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), a lighthouse-keeper’s son. From grade-school days, the two have been nearly constant companions, then lovers. As the Great War approaches (no one imagined that any war could follow it), Manech is called off to the front.
   However, in the trenches of Somme, he and four fellow soldiers have been condemned for wounding themselves to avoid further combat. As punishment, they are forced into the no-man’s land between French and German lines, where they should die either of exposure or of enemy fire.
   When news comes of their court-martial and probable end, Mathilde believes Manech could not possibly have died, otherwise she would know. Against the odds and the urgings of friends and family to move on with her life, Mathilde embarks on a quest to find her lover. She engages the services of a detective, Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado, who died shortly before the film was released). Because Pire’s daughter is afflicted with polio too, he cuts Mathilde a break on his fee.
   But Mathilde pursues her own leads. Unlike Pire, she is motivated by passion, not sidetracked by diversions of the flesh. She has no one to make excuses to. With only scraps of information and bits of coded letters, she pieces together a puzzlework of wives, friends and lovers whose lives have been shattered by the disappearance of these five men. Through a gradual retelling of the possible, probable and certain events surrounding the court martial and its aftermath, we see a battlefield where life is cheap, where civilized behavior has taken a vacation, and where acts of supreme cruelty alternate with those of selfless generosity.
   One of this film’s great pleasures is the atmosphere Jeunet creates through imaginative storytelling and camerawork. Like Amélie, which was the product of the same crew (indeed, Tautou insisted they be retained), this movie plays with lighting and angles of view and continuity. The film bathes many of the landscapes and the interiors in a chiaroscuro twilight that suggests a dream or a remembrance of events, as they are being told from time to time by a narrator. The battlefield scenes are as harrowing as anything from Saving Private Ryan, with the added irony that the carnage is a pointless waste in a pointless war. However, the sweeping French and Corsican landscapes and the quaint villages, before and after the war, are picture-perfect — as if nothing could ever happen, or had ever happened, to disturb their idyllic beauty.
   Befitting an epic tale, the character list is quite long and daunting. The interconnections Mathilde must make to find leads from one person or clue to the next can make you dizzy. After a while, I gave up trying to figure out who was married to whom and who was a friend with whom else. Part of Mathilde’s chore is to weed out the false leads. So once she has learned a certain "fact," it’s back to square one if the truth is elsewhere.
   If you follow French film closely, perhaps you’ll recognize some of the more prominent character actors. There are many. It’s a shock, however, to see a familiar American face pop out of the French woodwork in one Parisian street scene. Jodie Foster plays Jean-Luc Russier, the Polish-born widow of a fallen French soldier. Her story is too painful to tell Mathilde face-to-face, so she writes a letter to explain how the horrors of war have turned her marriage into a nightmare.
   But the centerpiece is Tautou, who is a winsome, subtle actress. Her Mathilde is not the comic ingenue of Amélie, but a determined, resourceful young woman who becomes a sort of French Nancy Drew when all else fails. It’s important that her lover, Manech, be an innocent, almost naive young man. And that he is. Manech stands for a generation who were robbed of a world in which their innocence could thrive. Like young love, that world was a fragile place, too soon crushed by furies indifferent to its beauty or its future.
Rated R. Contains violence and sexuality. In French with English subtitles.