A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT
[] (Three stars)
“Amélie” meets “Paths of Glory.” Running time: 134 minutes. In French, with English subtitles. Rated R (violence, sex). At the Paris and the Sunshine.
AS the punning title hints, there is a strong vein of whimsy running through “A Very Long Engagement,” an epic World War I romance that reunites the director and star of the French charmer “Amélie.”
The gamine-like Audrey Tautou plays Mathilde, a 20-year-old woman searching for a fiancé who has disappeared in the horrors of the Great War.
It’s an odd, initially jarring mixture of style and subject matter that works better as the film goes along – and the novelty of the setting and the Hollywood-style lavishness of the production go a long way toward justifying sitting through this very long movie.
It’s January 1917, and “Engagement” thrusts us right into the French trenches, where five French soldiers are convicted of deliberately mutilating themselves to escape duty.
They are forced into a no-man’s land between the French and German lines, and all five are reported dead in action.
The youngest of the five is Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), the son of a Breton lighthouse keeper.
He’s betrothed to Mathilde, who limps because of childhood polio and lives with her eccentric but loving Aunt Benedictine (Chantal Neuwirth) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinion).
When Mathilde receives the news about Manech just after the Armistice, her intuition won’t let her believe he is dead.
She hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) in Paris to track Manech down, and before long she is personally interviewing the colorful friends and family of the five exiled soldiers, sorting through clues like misdirected letters and purloined boots.
The film repeatedly flashes back to the war’s rat-filled trenches, and portrays the horrors of war with a grim realism that starkly contrasts with Jeunet’s perhaps overly cute portrayal of postwar France.
Though the outcome is never seriously in doubt, Jeunet, a great storyteller, maintains suspense up until the final sequence.
After a half-dozen films, it’s still hard to judge whether the winsome Tautou is more than an adequate actress, but the camera loves her, and in this role, that’s most of the battle.
The supporting cast is solid, especially the scene-stealing Jean-Paul Rouve, who makes regular appearances as a bicycle-riding messenger.
While very popular in France, this film has created controversy in its native country, mostly because it’s a rare French-language movie bankrolled by a Hollywood studio – $57 million, a huge budget by Gallic standards.
“A Very Long Engagement” may have a French outlook and verbosity, but it’s got Hollywood style – rapid editing and many images that are clearly enhanced with computer effects.
Small wonder Warner Bros. is pushing it in the Best Picture race.