:
Audrey Tautou,
Audrey Tautou,
Gaspard Ulliel,
more...
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Jean-Pierre Jeunet,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
see all cast/crew...
: 
: Warner Home Video
: Drama, Foreign, Romance, Costume Drama/Period Piece, France, WWII
: French
: English, Spanish, French
see additional details...
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A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Audrey Tautou, who rose to international stardom with the title role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's worldwide smash Amélie, reunites with the director for this drama, set during the darkest days of World War I and its immediate aftermath. Mathilde (Tautou) is a pretty but frail young women who was left with a bad leg after a childhood bout with polio. Mathilde lives in a small French village with her Aunt Bénédicte (Chantal Neuwirth) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon), and is engaged to marry Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), the son of a lighthouse keeper who is fighting with the army near the German front. Manech is one of five soldiers who have been accused of injuring themselves in order to be sent home; in order to discourage similar behavior among their comrades, Manech and the other soldiers are sentenced to death, and the condemned men are marched into the no man's land between the French and German lines, where they are certain to be killed. Mathilde receives word of Manech's death, but in her heart she believes that if the man she loved had been killed, she would know it and feel it. Convinced he's still alive somewhere, Mathilde hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) shortly after the end of the war, and together they set out to find the missing Manech. Jodie Foster appears in a supporting role as a Polish expatriate living in France. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
A Very Long Engagement (Bonus Disc) (2004)
Audrey Tautou, who rose to international stardom with the title role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's worldwide smash Amélie, reunites with the director for this drama, set during the darkest days of World War I and its immediate aftermath. Mathilde (Tautou) is a pretty but frail young women who was left with a bad leg after a childhood bout with polio. Mathilde lives in a small French village with her Aunt Bénédicte (Chantal Neuwirth) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon), and is engaged to marry Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), the son of a lighthouse keeper who is fighting with the army near the German front. Manech is one of five soldiers who have been accused of injuring themselves in order to be sent home; in order to discourage similar behavior among their comrades, Manech and the other soldiers are sentenced to death, and the condemned men are marched into the no man's land between the French and German lines, where they are certain to be killed. Mathilde receives word of Manech's death, but in her heart she believes that if the man she loved had been killed, she would know it and feel it. Convinced he's still alive somewhere, Mathilde hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) shortly after the end of the war, and together they set out to find the missing Manech. Jodie Foster appears in a supporting role as a Polish expatriate living in France. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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| Tautou You...
by PandT
September 13, 2005 - 10:24 PM PDT
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3 out of 3 members found this review helpful
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This is a very good film. The story begins on the battlefield where five WWI soldiers (in a common act for that horrible war) wound themselves intentionally to be sent to a field hospital (or anywhere for that matter) away from the horror that was trench warfare. They are found out and instead of execution they are sent back into no-man's-land for an even more awful sure death, even though one of the five is possibly innocent of his "crime".
In the meantime we meet Mathilde (played by Audrey Tautou of Amelie and Dirty Pretty Things fame) a young woman from the provinces of France whose fiancé is one of the five soldiers. She suffers from a polio limp, but this (or anything) can't keep her from a quest to find her young man, when she learns through a letter that the fiancé named Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) may have survived the war, as she had suspected in her heart all along.
The film takes us with Mathilde on a search through a visually beautiful French countryside as well as a wondrous Paris. The cinematography is truly breathless at times. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, City Of Lost Children and Delicatessen) is as adept at directing some of the most joyous moments in a film as he is at excruciatingly real battle sequences with all of the blood and guts. He is truly becoming one of film's better visualizers and storytellers.
Mathilde hires an aging private detective to aid her in the formidable task of interviewing the many possible human leads to this missing person mystery. Speaking of missing persons, Jeunet uses the story of a prostitute as a parallel character to Mathilde. The prostitute (played by a Jeunet regular Marion Cotillard) also had a lover among the five soldiers and is hunting him down as well, only in a completely different way, she is murdering her interviewees! She is hell-bent on revenge and is getting it.
The film has quite a romantic lilt despite all of the detailed bloodshed. It is not, however to be compared to Jeunet's much lighter and whimsical Amelie which also starred Audrey Tautou. We see much of the story in flashback, including Mathilde and Manech's early love affair. Manech is the son of a lighthouse keeper and is so handsome and charming that the locals have given him the name Cornflower. His innocent look is an important cinematic hook in keeping the audience in the hunt with Mathilde. I won't tell you if she indeed does finally reunite with Manech, I will however say the film has a powerful ending.
This is not a perfect film, the juxtaposition of the gritty WWI sequences and the charming Tautou and her relentless search for a lost love are what make this film work and not work at the same time. This type of back and forth storytelling can be rather wearing on the viewer considering the more than two hour length of the film. It is a difficult story to tell on film actually and Jeunot does the best anyone possibly could have done considering the complexity of deciding whether this is a love story, a war story or a mystery. This I think is more of a problem with the original book by Sebastien Japrisot than it is with this almost top rate very entertaining film.
One last thing, Jodie Foster has a minor role (speaking very good French) in the film; basically I found it to be a distracting cameo.
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| Very Long and Intermittently Engaging
by talltale
July 16, 2005 - 7:33 PM PDT
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3 out of 4 members found this review helpful
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So much story, visual effects, beauty--not to mention about half of France's stable of premier performers--have gone into A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT that it pains me to say that the movie doesn't quite work. It is beautiful and interesting enough to recommend, however--with a warning that you must pay VERY close attention to the first few minutes that describe the five soldiers around whom the plot revolves. In fact, watch that section twice or thrice. Otherwise, you may spend time stopping the film repeatedly and asking whomever is watching with you, "Now, is he/she the one who did this/that to him/her?" So convoluted do things become that you may even start nodding off, as lovely as many of the visuals continue to be.
Audrey Tatou appears a tad old to be courting the leading man, but Jodie Foster has some surprisingly hot sex scenes, a refreshing change of pace for this talented but sometimes stodgy actress. The ending is lovely, shimmering and full of tactful sentiment. However, Jean-Paul Rappenau's 1995 "The Horseman on the Roof" covers many of the same themes found here (love, war, survival, history and an ending that is the very soul of discretion) and handles them all--including the visuals--a lot better. |
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