A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiancailles)(2004)
A Very Long Engagement brings together director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his star, Audrey Tautou, the team who made Ameliea huge international success. And, as one’s admiration of Amelie was very much a matter of individual taste, so, too, A Very Long Engagement will find both admirers and detractors.
Based on a popular novel by Sebastien Japrisot, the film is a love story, a war story, and a detective story, all told with Jeunet’s characteristic combination of whimsy, sentiment, and rich use of computer generated imagery. Mathilde (Tautou) is an orphan, lame from a childhood case of polio, raised by her kindly aunt and uncle. Her fiance and lover, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), a soldier in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme of World War I, is reported to have been court-martialed and, in lieu of execution, pushed into the no-man’s land between the lines on a suicide mission. When Mathilde receives an official notice of his death, she refuses to believe it. She hires a detective to begin an investigation which involves the survivors of the four other soldiers on the mission. The story keeps changing as clues to what really happened on the battlefield that day are revealed. Even when the prospects seem hopeless, Mathilde never loses faith.
For a great deal of the film, Jeunet filters out most color, leaving a predominantly sepia tone which is both handsome and appropriate to the mood. The CGI effects are both clever and well-executed, especially making for battleground scenes of stark grimness. There is no glorification of war here; on the contrary, the mud-filled trenches, the mangled bodies, the self-mutilation, and the vain and amoral commanding officer combine to make a strong anti-war statement. (The brutal battleground scenes, and perhaps the several frankly sexual scenes, render the film inappropriate for young children.)
The problem is one of Jeunet having an all-too-fecund imagination, without the discipline to edit out excess material and hold on to the focus of his film–there’s enough material for three films here, too much for one. The unfolding story of what happened to Manech is often difficult to follow, especially since it involves characters only briefly met. The multiple subplots, the stories within the stories around the investigation not only can be confusing, but run on in such complications as to divert from the central narrative drive. There’s such an excess of plot and detail that characterization is neglected–none of these characters is more than single-dimensional and none change over the course of the story.
Further, Jeunet mixes the realism of the war with the idealism of the love story and then throws in enough whimsy to make it difficult to take any of it very seriously–Mathilde plays the tuba, the family dog has a flatulence problem, a prosthetic mechanical hand cracks nuts. A bit of side business with a postman on a bike might work better in another film; here it seems superfluous. Jeunet is also heavy-handed with his symbolism–the endless stairs to the top of a lighthouse, a repeated reference to an albatross as the embodiment of perseverance.
At two and a quarter hours, A Very Long Engagement seems very long, indeed.
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