A Very Long Engagement
With Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Marion Cotillard, Jerome Kircher, Jodie Foster
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A Very Long Engagement reunites Jeunet and Tautou, and though it’s positioned as a holiday release, Amelie fans in a festive mood might be shocked by its grim scenes of World War I trench warfare (its opening image is a bomb-damaged crucifix with the shattered torso of Christ dangling from one hand). The French command, faced with a rash of enlisted men mutilating themselves to avoid service, sentences five culprits to be marched up to the front lines in the Somme valley and tossed into no-man’s-land, where they’ll be slaughtered by the Germans. Based on Sebastien Japrisot’s 1991 novel Un long dimanche de fiancailles, Jeunet’s adaptation is a fierce antiwar statement in the style of Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front, though like its doomed soldiers A Very Long Engagement has been abandoned by its nation. Last month a French court declared the movie ineligible for film festivals as a French release because its production company, 2003 Productions, is one-third owned by an American studio, Warner Brothers.
Jeunet and his frequent screenwriting collaborator, Guillaume Laurant, have cut the number of major characters in half–to a still sizable 16–and wrestle Mathilde’s (Tautou) lengthy investigation into a story with two subplots: a series of mysterious murders that occur as she gathers clues, and a love triangle involving Bastoche (Jerome Kircher), the oldest of the condemned soldiers. The varying story lines are fluidly integrated using voice-overs, faux archival footage, jump cuts to different times and locations, and frenetic montage sequences that are set in the frame like old cameos. But perhaps by necessity Jeunet and Laurant have homogenized the book’s voices. The novel’s layered revelations about the soldiers’ fates are distilled into a standard series of chronological flashbacks.
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