Ill-Informed Gadfly

I have this movie at No. 5 on my Ten Best of 2004, and I’m happy to report it holds up well to repeated viewings. I’m now working my way through director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s commentary, in which he explains his technical wizardry but so far hasn’t devoted much discussion to the characters and themes that make “A Very Long Engagement” so gripping and moving. This is mildly disappointing, and perhaps suggests that in the future I will go back to disliking Jeunet, as I did before this movie. If all he’s interested in is a special crane that can make the camera bend every which way and go from a long shot to a closeup without cutting, or the digital color-correction that can conjure a mauve bedspread in a brown-and-yellow-tinted room, he probably has another insufferably empty confection like “Amelie” in his future.

Regardless, this is a hell of a movie. I will include my original 91 Seconds on Film review below, only adding that Jeunet’s larger story is the recovery and rebirth of a nation after one of history’s most horrific wars. Mathilde’s dogged, chin-up pursuit of her perhaps-not-dead fiancé embodies the spirit of France as it rediscovers its pluck and personality. Her visit to the site of the trench where Manech was last seen, now a flowery field that leaves few hints of the carnage that took place there three years earlier, thrillingly illustrates the theme of resurrection.

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“A Very Long Engagement” is a stirring, emotionally complete saga of hope triumphing over the senseless carnage of World War I. It’s a triumphant breakthrough for the madcap director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose previous movies tended to drown in jerry-rigged cutesiness or overloaded production design. This time, Jeunet has found a story with the thematic heft to support his digitally enhanced visual wizardry.

Audrey Tautou, the beguiling star of Jeunet’s “Amelie,” returns as Mathilde, a polio survivor whose fiancé, Manech, is presumed dead after being dumped in the no-man’s land between the French and German lines as punishment for self-mutilation. Her refusal to accept that he is dead is the starting point for a thrillingly intricate tale packed with meaningful subplots and parallel storylines. These include a prostitute’s ingeniously sadistic revenge for her pimp’s death on the battlefield and a soldier’s wife provoked by extraordinary circumstances into a passionate affair with her husband’s best friend. The soldier’s wife is played by Jodie Foster in a warm, brave, heartbreaking performance.

At every turn, Jeunet celebrates ingenuity and invention, whether through the doggedness of the private eye investigating Manech’s case, the arbitrary challenges Mathilde creates for herself in hopes of determining whether Manech is alive, or the improvisatory genius of soldiers trying to stay alive on the battlefield. In one spectacular set piece after another, Jeunet never loses sight of the people. “A Very Long Engagement” is an effective, important war film that’s also delightfully idiosyncratic and personal.