Release Date: November 26, 2004
Starring: Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Ticky Holgado, André Dussollier, Tchéky Karyo, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Marion Cotillard
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillaume Laurant
Distributed by: Warner Independent Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (violence, sexuality)
A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) is sort of the French version of Cold Mountain, a romance of epic proportions that thinks it’s a war picture, and the story of two young, blissful lovers kept apart for years by a war of increasing absurdity. Unlike Cold Mountain, this story, which is set during World War I, unfolds in the shape of a mystery: Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), the heroine, is told that her fiancé, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), was court-martialed and condemned to die -- he was pushed out of a trench into the no-man’s land between the French and German lines. But none of the soldiers present that day ever saw Manech die, which leaves Mathilde room to hope that somewhere, somehow, Manech escaped, and survived.
The movie begins in the trenches in 1917, with the story of Manech and four other men also condemned with him, a glimpse of World War I at its most sadistic and inhumane. Every war has its ugly lows and the movies and filmmakers that lay them bare -- Steven Spielberg and World War II, or Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola and Vietnam -- but there are moments during the war scenes in A Very Long Engagement when you think that World War I was surely the worst of them all: Men starving, freezing, and dying of frostbite or gangrene, knee-deep in mud and trying to survive under a constant hail of shrapnel and ordnance. The scenes are even more shocking than usual because they are the prelude to what is supposed to be a romance; you cannot fault the director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, for pulling any punches on account of genre.
After we see Manech’s plight -- stuck out in no-man’s land, maybe dead and maybe not -- the movie fast-forwards to 1920 and switches to Mathilde, a young, resilient woman played with a determined stoicism by Audrey Tautou. The many viewers who saw Tautou in Jeunet’s previous film, Amélie, will be surprised at the change here: She does not giggle, and she does not flit about the screen with the distinct sense that she is up to some elfin mischief. The only downside is that the part calls for her to abandon her energetic charisma: Mathilde, who was orphaned as a young girl and now lives with her aunt and uncle, is rendered nearly lame by polio, but, as she demonstrates early on, she is still very clever, and uses her disability several times to further her investigation into Manech’s whereabouts.
Mathilde’s search for Manech, which is carried out with the help of a skilled private investigator named Germain Pire (nicknamed “the peerless pry,” and played with a devilish smile by Ticky Holgado) and her parents’ lawyer, Rouvières (André Dussollier), leads Mathilde on a breathless chase across France and into a number of encounters with a vivid cast of characters. The film has an elegant, expansive look and is well acted throughout. The cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel, has shot the picture in rich browns and greens for the scenes with Mathilde, and in flat, anonymous grays for the war scenes with Manech; it is a division of convenience as well as symbolism.
Each of the people Mathilde encounters reveals another part of Manech’s story, and then their portion of the tale is recreated by Jeunet (who also co-wrote the screenplay, which was based on Sébastien Japrisot’s novel, with Guillaume Laurant). The transitions can be jarring, but this was probably Jeunet’s intent: All of the condemned soldiers were arrested for self-mutilation, shooting themselves in the hand in the hopes of being evacuated from the front lines because, for one reason or another, they could not bear another day of war. The soldiers around them react with varying degrees of sympathy: a wizened old captain named Favourier (Tchéky Karyo) who commands the trench where the soldiers will be pushed out into no-man’s land cannot believe the absurdity of his orders -- why couldn’t the soldiers simply have gotten lost along the way? Other soldiers are indifferent, and some, including the regiment’s lascivious commandant, Lavrouye (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), actively conspire against them. Characters like this provide a timely reminder that although no one likes war, blaming the other side for the carnage is all too easy. Every country and every army has its misanthropes.
A hopeful undercurrent of universal goodwill surges through A Very Long Engagement, and one that becomes even more poignant when the movie ties off its loose plot threads in the final act. There is, for instance, a Corsican prostitute named Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard) who is also investigating the strange events surrounding the soldiers condemned with Manech -- but, for whatever reason, she seems to be ruthlessly murdering all those involved. When she and Mathilde meet in the final act, their conversation in a dank jail cell reveals an unexpected side of Tina’s character as well as Manech’s part of the story; the same goes for a conversation Mathilde has with a German war widow in a Paris café near the end of the movie. Jeunet, who fancies himself a fabulist (especially after Amélie and this movie), has an unmistakable desire for endings with significance, a desire that is perfectly matched with Engagement’s grand, thematically rich story. This is no ordinary murder mystery, but an investigation of the depths of the human soul: How long will Mathilde hold out hope that Manech is still alive? What has Manech been up to since disappearing in the no-man’s land three years ago? But the ending is as understated as the rest of the movie is sensational, a neatly done coda that, even if it is for the millionth time, effectively and emotionally suggests that love is infinitely more powerful than any machinery of war.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)