A Very Long Engagement (aka Un long dimanche de fiançailles) (2004) (France)

[hengcs]

The official website is here ...
http://wip.warnerbros.com/avle/#

Well, what I like about the movie?
- Definitely the ending scene! ;) It was very well done. It conveyed so much without being too exploitive. I know some people will demand more of the ending, but I still think it is the BEST ending scene ...
- The production set.
- The cinematography. Visually dazzling, with a mix of "black and white" "old" film style, to sepia colored, to rich colors of the Impressionists, ... etc
- The character played by Jodie Foster. I believe most people would recall this subplot/story/vignette more than any others.
- I believe (even though I read the subtitles) that the original dialogue in French must be great, because some of the subtitles (even though translated) seems interesting.
- The multi genre?! romance, war, thriller, etc ... It has a good mix of sadness and humor ...

However, there are minor rooms for improvements ...
- In the beginning, it was difficult to keep track of all the different characters, and their stories, etc. It took a while before one can fully identify with all the characters.
- Even though I have never read the book, I think I can guess the ending ... Maybe the movie could have made it more difficult to guess (especially for audiences who have not read the book).


Conclusion:
Watch it!
The movie does feel kind of Hollywood at times ... hee hee
;)

[HorseradishTree]

I think that as a whole, this film is a masterpiece. At first, I wasn't liking it, as the beginning was chock full of so many different characters, and Audrey Tautou's character seemed to just pop in and become the protagonist. However, I soon discovered that the structure was anything but linear, and as the mystery unraveled itself, so did the explanation of her desire to find her lost love. In the end, I understood almost everything. It took me a little while, driving home, to fully understand the rest, but that wasn't a problem. The photography is beautiful and disturbing, a very passionate depiction of World War I and its effects on everyone and everything. I verily and definitely recommend the film.

[oscar jubis]

I was disappointed to read that the number of major characters from Sebastien Japrisot's source novel have been cut IN HALF for this adaptation. After reading both of your posts, I'm thinking it was a good idea. Will come back with comments after viewing.

[Howard Schumann]

Here is my review:

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT (Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (2004)

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment" - Rumi

In Miracle on 34th Street as Natalie Wood is trying to decide about Santa Claus, her mother tells her that "faith is believing in something when common sense tells you not to." In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's brilliant new film, A Very Long Engagement , Mathilde (Audrey Tatou) is a case in point. A polio victim since childhood, she maintains faith that she will one day be reunited with her fiancé Manech, a conscript in World War I, who is reported to be dead. Based on the 1991 novel by Sebastien Japrisot , the film is a dreamlike exploration of two sides of human nature: the darkness that leads to the horror of war, and the lightness that embodies the power of love. There are multiple subplots and a plethora of characters that make the film difficult to keep up with and Jenuet seems at times a bit taken with his own cleverness, but Mathilde's unrelenting mission to discover the truth keeps us focused.

The film opens in the style of Jeunet's Amelie as a soft-voiced narrator (Florence Thomassin) introduces the main characters. Manech, a baby-faced nineteen year old, is one of five soldiers court-martialed for wounding themselves to escape the front lines. Along with Manech, who is in a state of shock, are Bastoche (Jerome Kircher), Six-Sous (Denis Lavant), Ange Bassignano (Dominique Bettenfeld) and Benoit Notre-Dame (Clovis Cornillac). The sadistic punishment for the five men is not execution but being dropped off in a no-man's land without weapons or protection, where their chances of survival are very slim.

Four years after the war, Mathilde refuses to believe that Manech is dead in spite of various eyewitness accounts of his being hit by machine gun fire. Her search for her childhood sweetheart forms the main storyline and the mystery unfolds slowly like pieces of a puzzle being fit together. With the support of her Aunt Benedicte (Chantal Neuwith) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon) who raised her after her parents were killed in a bus accident at age three, Mathilde hires a private detective Germain Pire (Ticky Holgado) to investigate. She undertakes her own search as well, compiling photographs, news stories, interviews with survivors who may be possible leads, and visits to Paris and Bingo Crépuscule, the trench where the soldiers were sentenced to death. Audrey Tatou is convincing in her role and we root for her to find her man, though we know the odds are stacked against it.

Her search leads her to discover for herself the barbarity of war and the courage of the individual soldier, fighting tenaciously for survival in the trenches. The film does not spare our sensibilities in graphically showing war scenes as unsettling as the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan . Jeunet is a master of cinematic tricks, and there is plenty here to keep us dazzled: flashbacks, fast edits, colorful imagery, and tones that alternate between sepia, salmon, and blue, but the film is not about cinematic showmanship. It is about a relationship that is deeper than physical and one person's fierce determination to go beyond reasonableness and alter what is accepted as reality. A Very Long Engagement will not be eligible for nomination as the year's best foreign-language film because one third of it is American produced. I would suggest instead a nomination for best picture. It is that good.

GRADE: A-

[oscar jubis]

Jeunet states in Premiere magazine that he's coveted the rights to Sebastien Japrisot's novel since its publication in 1991. Apparently he didn't find the source material compelling enough. Jeunet is a talented show-off who has decided to stage two absurd, overwrought revenge murders by a soldier's prostitute lover. He gets Mathilde off the wheelchair for a ridiculous scene in a military records room, and gives her a tuba to play for purely decorative purposes. As if we haven't seen enough explosions, the director contrives to have a helium-filled balloon blow up at the precise moment a character enters the hangar. Maybe Jeunet figured that the film needed a "Michael Bay moment" to justify the dough he got from Warner Brothers. A Very Long Engagement is still worth your time and money. But it's much less than it could have been had Jeunet kept a rein on his excesses.

[Chris Knipp]

What turns out to be, ultimately, a very long movie

A Very Long Engagement, or Une longue dimanche de fiançailles, is a strange movie and, as the title implies, a very long one -- or at least for those of us who do not embrace its combination of whimsy and gore, it seems so. Nonetheless, from among all the interesting autumn film releases in France, fate and Miramax -- or was it Warner Bros.? They put up a lot of the dough -- have decreed that this costly sweet-and-sour confection be chosen as the pièce de résistence with which to charm that part of the American public who have not replaced "French" fries with "liberty" ones, and might even use the phrase "pommes frites".

The reason is not far to seek: box office potential. Jean-Pierre Jeunet did extremely well last time with les yanquis. As foreign films go in America, his Amélie -- or, more correctly Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, was as hot as asphalt in July. It got five Oscar nominations and made a hefty (for a foreign film) $33 at the gate. But this new one is a war movie, and whimsical though the plot is, a lot has been spent on making the bombardments and mutilations, the sprays of blood, as striking as they are realistic. It certainly would seem unlikely that the art house audience will embrace A Very Long Engagement the way they did the blood-and-guts free Amélie; but you never know. Jeunet's insured himself a carry-over for fans by again featuring Amélie's winsome Audrey Tautou. (He may have fallen in love with the success of his last movie, though he's been drawn back a bit from the saccharine into gore.) Just as this is not such a cute movie, Tautou's not so cute this time either; she's reduced to clumping around manfully with a leg-length differential from childhood polio. But she's still got that smile.

Indeed, what a peculiar, warped idea it is, to reduce all the horrors of World War I trench warfare to a far-fetched Rashoman-like investigation by Mathilde (Tautou) to track down a young man called Manech. Manech is played by the Gaspar Ulliel who was so feral and interesting in Téchiné's Strayed but is reduced to little more than a few flashbacks and a big dimple here. Manech was Mathilde's childhood sweetheart and briefly her fiancé. The minute they got engaged he was called off to war. They've told Mathilde that Manech is dead and she won't believe it.

The filigreed, elongated tale then focuses, with Jeunet's curious unemotional obsessiveness, upon a crew of five French soldiers who've wound up, in the craziness of war and the brutal code of the trenches, getting condemned to die for self-mutilation -- a bum rap for at least one of them, who was just clumsy, or got involved in a freak accident. One of these, of course, is Manech. They were dumped in a no-man's land, the nearby French soldiers got massacred by the Germans, and nobody much was around to see what happened to the condemned prisoners. The question is, what happened to him? If he can't be quite accounted for, how do we know he's dead? And Ms. Tautou's character refuses to believe that.

Okay, that's romantic. But the story's intricate, farfetched, and intermittently gruesome. The screen is the site of some of the most elaborate and expensive mise-en-scène ever produced by the original inventors of the term. The confusions and alternative versions of what happened are impossible to summarize or to follow, and hence ultimately impossible also to care about. The love story is fragmentary, the boyfriend is a cameo. And given that Ulliel is a more expressive actor than Tautou (watch her in Frears's Dirty Pretty Things and you'll see how limited she is), that's a pity -- and a miscalculation.

You keep following the elaborate, over-produced narrative, hoping it will begin to matter, that the love story will come to life either in the flashbacks or in the future, but it never does; and the extreme grimness of the trench scenes is hard to reconcile with the fairytale playfulness of the story. It seems almost insensitive, criminal, to base such cuteness on a world of blood-spattered corpses and mutilated limbs. This movie contains some very grave clashes of tone. And the most elaborate use of digital effects in a French film yet.

Amid a supporting cast with considerable depth (some of all that money was spent hiring familiar faces), including Jodie Foster speaking excellent French and carrying more warmth than most of these exotic provincial gallic caricatures with regional accents and twirly moustaches, this movie includes the brilliant, and lately ubiquitous, Clovis Cornillac in it, perhaps the first time Americans will notice him -- if they can spot him through the crumpled uniform, the mud, and the blood. He bears an attention-getting name: Benoît Notre-Dame.

This director is a master too much in love with his own invention and cleverness; but mind you, there are beauties here: Jeunet's over-production also means high production values which in turn means a ravishing palette rich in browns and stunning panoramas with dazzling uses of natural light. But despite a unifying, as well as distancing, voiceover narration by somebody who sounds like Mathilde but speaks of her in the third person, it's all too intricate and goes on too long to engage us. When the end comes, it's an anticlimax and brings not revelation but relief.

[HorseradishTree]

You guys are making good points, but I still think I"m going to stand by my thoughts. I do think, however, that The City of Lost Children is far superior, and is much more subtle in its beauty.