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MovieMail's Review
Jeunet's entrancing new film is a romance at heart, one that skilfully weaves strands of an intriguing murder-mystery with those of a young man caught up in a brutal war. Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) and Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) are childhood sweethearts, separated by his conscription into the Great War. She learns that he and four other soldiers have been court-marshalled and sent into no-man's land to die after injuring themselves in a bid to return home. Mathilde does not believe that he is dead - if he were, she would know - so she begins her investigation, searching for proof, one way or other, of her love's fate. The search bears fruit, uncovering murder, identity swaps, infidelity and, this being a Jeunet film, a mechanical wooden hand.
As you would expect from the director of films with such lush, visual splendour as The City of the Lost Children and Amelie, A Very Long Engagement is always impressive to behold. The gamut of locations is wide - from the monochrome mud and tears of the Somme to the bustling markets of 1920s Paris, each builds to define Jenuet's unique and engrossing world - not so far from our own but definably so. Each location teems with detail, evoking such comparisons as Bosch, Bruegel the Elder and Belleville Rendezvous (itself influenced by Jeunet's earlier work). Jeunet's two most distinctive traits are his visual flair and his charming, curious flights of fancy. It's clear that the two are heavily related to one another - the variety and depth of detail on display build a world where he can take any person or object and effortlessly spin us a yarn of its strange past.
Jenuet's work can always be relied upon to thrill the eyes, however it wasn't until Amelie that he produced a cohesive film that truly 'worked'. A Very Long Engagement furthers this success, telling a complex tale with verve and passion.
As World War I draws to an end, Mathilde has received word that her fiancé Manech is one of five wounded soldiers who have been court-martialled and pushed out into the no-man's land between the French and German armies. Unwilling to accept that her beloved is dead, she embarks on an extraordinary journey to discover his fate. At each turn, she receives a different variation of how Manech must have spent his last days. Still her heart cannot accept that he is dead.
In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's brilliant A Very Long Engagement , Mathilde (Audrey Tatou), a polio victim since childhood, maintains faith that one day she will be reunited w... more >
In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's brilliant A Very Long Engagement , Mathilde (Audrey Tatou), a polio victim since childhood, maintains faith that one day she will be reunited with her fiancé Manech, a conscript in World War I, reported to be dead. Based on the 1991 novel by Sebastien Japrisot , the film is a dreamlike exploration of two sides of human nature: the darkness that leads to the horror of war, and the lightness that embodies the power of love.
Four years after the war, Mathilde refuses to believe that Manech is dead in spite of various eyewitness accounts of his being hit by machine gun fire. Her search for her childhood sweetheart forms the main storyline and the mystery unfolds slowly like pieces of a puzzle being fit together. With the support of her Aunt Benedicte (Chantal Neuwith) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon) who raised her after her parents were killed in a bus accident at age three, Mathilde hires a private detective Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado) to investigate. She undertakes her own search as well, compiling photographs, news stories, interviews with survivors who may be possible leads, and visits to Paris and Bingo Crépuscule, the trench where the soldiers were sentenced to death.
Her search leads her to discover for herself the barbarity of war and the courage of the individual soldier, fighting tenaciously for survival in the trenches. Jeunet is a master of cinematic tricks, and there is plenty here to keep us dazzled: flashbacks, fast edits, colorful imagery, and tones that alternate between sepia, salmon, and blue, but the film is about something much deeper. It is about a relationship that is more than physical and one person's fierce determination to alter what is accepted as reality. < less
