Warner Home Video VHS & DVD
2 hrs 16 mins
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
The beginning passage of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s WWI themed “A Very Long Engagement” (“Un long dimanche de fiançailles”) evokes a similar image to German director GW Pabst’s 1931 film, “Westfront 1918.” It is a wooden statue of Christ on the cross, whose rotting form towers above the gloomy Somme battlefield, a symbolic externalization and anti-beacon for the German and French soldiers scurrying in the mud. It’s a powerful icon that, for good or bad, haunts the rest of this uneven film whose harrowing passages are marred by director Jeunet’s saccharine sense of kitsch.
This unfortunate tone of “A Very Long Engagement” may be a symptom of another pairing between director Jeunet with his “Amelie” star Audrey Tautou. I was in the minority with “Amelie”: I found it annoying and empty because it relied on technique instead of essence, using third person narration to flesh out the emotional material. Jeunet infuses the same style into “A Very Long Engagement.” Luckily this film has more marrow in its bones.
Based upon Sebastien Japrisot’s book of the same title, “A Very Long Engagement” is essentially a detective film where the truth is doubly hard to find within the muddy depths of the Somme trenches and its mad and disfigured survivors. Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) is a 20-something girl whose fiancé Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) has been executed in the war for cowardice. The style and reason for his execution, however, remains murky and Mathilde feels he is still alive. Through her investigations, she learns that Manech had been forced, along with six other soldiers, out into No Man’s Land where death would surely be swift.
Mathilde soon finds inconsistencies in the testimonies from the survivors. Some, in the trenches, saw Manech die; others never located his body. There are still others who seem to think some of the prisoners had escaped that day in the Somme. All this is told in the most horrific flashbacks that seem to rise above the rest of the material and form part of the film’s heart. It is among the carnage and personal dramas that director Jeunet also finds his film. Jeunet uses his violence to evoke its participants’ hallucinatory camaraderie; Jeunet’s camera, with its wide lenses and distorted space, captures the soldiers’ futility.
In the end, “A Very Long Engagement” does not achieve greatness because it is too scatterbrained and Mathilde’s story feels like an elongated footnote rather than a weighty part of the story. The film is overlong and feels longer because there are too many narratives. To be fair, some passages, as one with Jodi Foster (!) playing a widow of one of the prisoners whose poignant story may be the key to the mystery, are compelling, but most are unnecessary. The cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel has a wonderful, digitized palette that works for the film, especially in a tranquil pastoral moment where Mathilde walks through an endless field that was the Somme battlefield and the red tint of the grass is a sad reminder.
–Joe Ramirez
