A Very Long Engagement

Review by: Alysa Salzberg
AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com

With movies like City of Lost Children and Delicatessan (my personal favorite) that garnered him cult notoriety, and the incredible worldwide success of 2001's Amélie still in our minds, you could say French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has a lot to measure up to with his latest film, A Very Long Engagement (original title: Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles). Fans of Jeunet's work, from average cats like you and me, colleagues like fellow director Terry Gilliam, have probably already sought out images and trailers for the eagerly awaited Engagement. And, with their baroque camera angles (a Jeunet signature), meticulous set design, great costumes, and sepia-colored overtones, these sneak peeks don't look half bad. But there's still that nagging doubt at the back of everyone's mind -- I don't cotton to physics, but after all, What goes up, must come down.

After seeing the movie, I'm glad to say that apparently Jeunet and his cast and crew seem to have disregarded this inevitable rule.

One of the things -- maybe the biggest thing -- that made Amélie successful, was the enveloping mood that Jeunet created. Exhuberantly, quickly, we were plunged into the magical, quirky Paris where an impish, childlike young woman was on a quest for love and human contact. It seemed like it would be hard to watch A Very Long Engagement without thinking of this film. In fact, you sort of expect it. So many of the same elements are there: the gaggle of eccentric characters, a quest for love -- and, of course, Amélie herself, or, rather, Audrey Tautou, the actress who played her, in the leading role. Tautou's been in a number of other films before and since Amélie, and has been defended by lots of people as a versatile actress. But for most of us, sorry dude, she's still Amélie. Until now. I mean, alright, a part of you will probably always remember her as Amélie, but in Engagement Tautou does what all great actors have the ability to do: transcend their best-known role and bring another character to life.

Here, Audrey plays Mathilde, a no-nonsense young woman with a persistence that defies reason. One of Mathilde's legs is damaged from a childhood bout with polio, but this injury is nothing compared to a deeper one: the disappearance and supposed death of her lifelong love Manech (rising French star Gaspard Ulliel) in the trenches of the First World War. Manech and several other soldiers were ordered executed because they deliberately injured themselves so as not to have to continue on at the front. Mathilde can't help but feel that Manech is still alive, even though the War's now over, and he hasn't come back to her. Without Manech, Mathilde doesn't want to go on living. So she sets out on a quest to find out what really happened to ...