If you liked
Amélie
, you'll love World War I.
The French word for director seems oddly idealistic:
réalisiteur
. But this makes perfect sense when contemplating the realizations of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose sense of visual design and composition is staggeringly complete. When Jeunet makes a film he makes a whole world, omitting nothing. Post-
Amélie
, he's done it all over again with
A Very Long Engagement
, a superbly envisioned and achieved period piece which practically has Uncle Oscar superimposed over the opening credits.
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Jeunet drags us along from the film's opening, trudging blearily through the trenches of WWI as five court-martialed men prepare to throw themselves into no-man's-land, condemned to death for self-mutilation in an attempt to be sent home. The fifth and cutest soldier, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) daydreams of his lovely provincial bride-to-be Mathilde (Audrey Tautou)-but into German sights he and his confrères must go, while viewers and fiancées alike are left to wonder who survives the crossfire and how. Once more Amélie-excuse me, Mathilde-must open a mysterious metal box and blow the dust off unsent letters and other clues contained therein to solve the riddle of her fiancé's life and perhaps untimely death.
Always entertaining to watch, Tautou's face continues to be the perfect canvas for what Jeunet wants to achieve; she's secretive, amused and private in a way no American actress could ever be. In a way, Jeunet has refilmed
Amélie
and set it in 1920. Tautou embarks again on a idiosyncratic but deeply personal quest, with a fabulous upturned hat and big brown eyes, meeting quirky Dickensian characters along the way-though here she's slightly less whimsical, more grim than gamine, as befits an era of war. And the persistent inquisitiveness which was so adorable in
Amélie
becomes sheer stubbornness here; Tautou depicts an almost pathologically intransigent young woman who refuses to believe what everyone around her holds to be the truth-that her lover is dead.
There's no doubt in his earlier films made with designer Marc Caro (
Delicatessen
,
City of Lost Children
)-or for that matter, in
Alien: Resurrection
-Jeunet displayed an edge he's now discarded, a kind of freakish high-sci-fi silliness unpalatable to most Americans, who like our Camembert well-refrigerated, thank you
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very much. Still, fans will behold with delight the usual Jeunet sidekicks (Dominique Pinon, Ticky Holgado, Denis Lavant) as well as some new revelations (sexy Marion Cotillard as "the Corsican's whore," memorably spitting on a knife blade before its vigorous employment). But beware to those who mistakenly think this will be insipid date fare; Jeunet's battle scenes are fairly uncompromising, some downright chilling (such as one of the French arming their bayonets prior to a doomed charge).
So never mind that Warner Brothers rather than CANAL backed
A Very Long Engagement
, or that Cannes deemed it "not French enough" and therefore unsuitable (possibly due to the surprise appearance of an exceedingly un-French
actrice
). But most films with the rubber stamp of francophilic approval don't shimmer with fairytale bewilderment while also sweeping across vast epic reaches. With
A Very Long Engagement
Jeunet perhaps wanted to prove he could sustain a more serious effort; now it seems he's realized that ambition as well.
