A Very Long Engagement

(2004, Dir.: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Audrey Tatou)

Ever the stylist, in A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet takes a step forward and marries his unique sense of aesthetics to a more complex and emotional story than in his entertaining but fairly lightweight Amelie.

Good environmentalist Jeunet likes to recycle performers, so Audrey Tatou is back as Mathilde, as is the boomerang-faced Dominique Pinot (who has appeared in all of Jeunet's films) as her uncle, though his hypnotically unusual face is half-hidden by a thick beard. Given his clear obsession with aesthetics, even in his actors, it is worth noting that Jeunet does not sacrifice ability for a fascinating face-of course, any director who casts Jodie Foster gets considerable benefit of the doubt in this regard.

After a prologue from the trenches of World War I, where five condemned prisoners go to meet their ends, the story begins in earnest after the end of the war with Mathilde, the crippled young fiancee of one of the condemned, who finds reason, however thin, to support her belief that her beloved somehow survived and needs only to be found. What follows is not so much the story of the effort to reunify lovers, but the quixotic pursuit of a dream in spite of the crushing persistence of reality.

The film moves back and forth between scenes of the five "malingerers" meeting their fate in the no-man's land between the French and German lines and Mathilde's detective work tracking down her lost love. This second half of the story is rife with Dickensian coincidence, but this only lends itself to the dream quality of the film. The long engagement is Mathilde's dream becoming married to the reality of her future--in a sense, the movie is all prologue, as Mathilde herself at one point observes.

Jeunet is not entirely successful in reining in all of the disparate elements of the story, but his sense of pacing is good enough that things never spin wholly out of control. And the film is sprawling, with breathtaking escapes from certain death, romantic interludes, an "affair" that comes between two friends on the lines, and an exploding blimp. It's the perfect date movie, really. (There's a quote for the adverts.) Yet for all its dazzle and plot-heavy mechanics, the heart of the film is the simple love of a woman for, not a man, but a dream of a man. The coda, which I don't wish to give away, sublimely connects the dream to reality by stripping away aesthetics for simple emotional resonance.