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 him in those trenches, and, hoping against all odds that her feeling is right, to find him, no matter what.

The movie’s a mystery story, a thriller (complete with an enigmatic murderess (Marion Cotillard) who wears many disguises), a love story, and a period piece all rolled into one. It gives a chance for Jeunet to do a number of things he’s known for, not the least parade out another flock of strange individuals, such as Mathilde’s down-to-earth, landscaping-obsessed peasant uncle (played by Jeunet favorite Dominique Pinon), or a woman with a strange love story of her own (yep, that’s Jodie Foster, speaking excellent French) that provides a key to the mystery.

But A Very Long Engagement is even more than this. Already released in France, where it was number one at the box office, the film’s been widely praised for many things, including its set design. It’s true that in all his films Jeunet loves to show us tiny details — just think of the kitschy, crumbling decors of Delicatessan‘s post-apocalyptic apartments, or the quaint paintings on Amélie’s bedroom walls. But in Engagement, besides this beautiful attention to detail, Jeunet succeeds at another challenge: this time around, it’s not about showing us a world of his creation or his version of a present-day place that actually exists; here, Jeunet has to bring back the past.

In more ways than one. It’s not enough to put everyone in period costumes and set them loose in a dazzling recreation of 1919 Paris (when Les Halles was a huge outdoor market, not a touristy area of bars and stores, and Trocadéro was a cool-looking Oriental-style pavilion), or to plunge us into the boggy, damp trenches and devastated No Man’s Land of the warfront. No, as in any good movie that takes place in another time, the director’s got to make the audience feel the way these people felt. And Jeunet (who, incidentally, claims to be intrigued with and obsessed by this time period) does a fantastic job, often just by using that signature attention to details. For example, the trenches are flooded up to the ankle with water, and soldiers’ damp socks hang everywhere in the futile hope of getting dry. Sure this makes us think of the soldiers as people, and relate to them, but it also makes us realize how unpleasant World War I was, on every level. I mean, even your socks wouldn’t be dry — what a nagging, constant misery, a nagging, constant misery that’s a microcosm of the entire feeling of the seemingly endless face-off on the front. Jeunet’s attention to detail also serves him well in filming scenes of

war-time violence; though we do get some harrowing and impressive images of widespread carnage, explosions, etc., what’s most impressive (and often more than flinch-worthy) are scenes of individual soldier’s agonizing deaths, injuries, and, of course, when it comes to Manech and his condemned compatriots, self-mutilation. But don’t be scared off, ye of weak stomaches — these images are done tastefully; in interviews, Jeunet’s mentioned that in shooting such scenes, it’s more about what the audience doesn’t see, than in showing incredible amounts of gore.

But more impressive, and, I think, more important, than these images, is that, somewhere along the line, both in scenes of battle on the front and scenes of Mathilde’s own battle to find Manech, we get the impression of the devastation of this war, not only in terms of the lives and limbs it took, but also in the toll it took on the Western world’s mentality. Every character, every quirky person Mathilde meets is somehow muted, injured, even afraid, of this war and its consequences. Everyone’s lost someone, no matter how remote. Amélie gave us a colourful; vibrant universe; Engagement transports us to a sorrowful, sombre place a million miles away.

In his choice of star, and even, basically, of subject, you could say that Jeunet just wanted to do Amélie II. But watching Engagement, you’ll totally forget that first film. The movie brings you to another time and way of thinking. In this way, Engagement is a total success, even if its sadder tone may not give it the alluring and engrossing feel Amélie. The only major problem I could see is that a number of the soldiers in the film, soldiers who are major parts of the movie, look a lot alike, and some even have similar names, which can make things a bit confusing, to say the least. But maybe this is a part of Jeunet’s grand plan: Though it’s billed as primarily a romance, to me A Very Long Engagement is equally, and maybe even foremost, a film about the first World War and what it did to people, from the misery and horror of life in the trenches, to the hopes and grief of loved ones back home. If some characters are hard to tell apart, maybe that’s Jeunet’s way of reminding us that, even though for most people today this War seems like a long-ago event full of nameless, blurred crowds of dead, at one point, even those names and faces that were most common and most alike, were living human beings with lives and emotions and even intrigues behind them. The War and its aftermath were about violence, despair, loss…and a hope people had to fight just as hard as those millions of soldiers in flooded, barbed-wire trenches, to keep alive.

Movie Grade: A

Synopsis:

From the director and star of Amelie(Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou) comes a very different love story, A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT, based on the acclaimed novel by Sebastien Japrisot. Screenplay adaptation by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Guillaume Laurant. The film is set in France near the end of World War I in the deadly trenches of the Somme, in the gilded Parisian halls of power, and in the modest home of an indomitable provincial girl. It tells the story of this young woman’s relentless, moving and sometimes comic search for her fiancée, who has disappeared. He is one of five French soldiers believed to have been court-martialed under mysterious circumstances and pushed out of an allied trench into an almost-certain death in no-man’s land. What follows is an investigation into the arbitrary nature of secrecy, the absurdity of war, and the enduring passion, intuition and tenacity of the human heart.