Audrey Tautou, who rose to international stardom with the title role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's worldwide smash Amélie, reunites with the director for this drama, set during the darkest days of World War I and its immediate aftermath. Mathilde (Tautou) is a pretty but frail young women who was left with a bad leg after a childhood bout with polio. Mathilde lives in a small French village with her Aunt Bénédicte (Chantal Neuwirth) and Uncle Sylvain (Dominique Pinon), and is engaged to marry Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), the son of a lighthouse keeper who is fighting with the army near the German front. Manech is one of five soldiers who have been accused of injuring themselves in order to be sent home; in order to discourage similar behavior among their comrades, Manech and the other soldiers are sentenced to death, and the condemned men are marched into the no man's land between the French and German lines, where they are certain to be killed. Mathilde receives word of Manech's death, but in her heart she believes that if the man she loved had been killed, she would know it and feel it. Convinced he's still alive somewhere, Mathilde hires a private detective (Ticky Holgado) shortly after the end of the war, and together they set out to find the missing Manech. Jodie Foster appears in a supporting role as a Polish expatriate living in France. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's most sophisticated achievement to date, if not actually his best film, A Very Long Engagement marks the first instance of the director's trademark techniques applied to a story of historical consequence. In addition to possessing Jeunet's usual busy narration and array of interconnected characters, it's also a visual tour de force, having earned Oscar nominations for both its art direction and cinematography. Jeunet brings equal loving attention to the grimy battlefields as to the pretty French countryside and fantastic cityscapes that have always fascinated him. But it's the film's opening minutes that really announce Jeunet's somber departure from Amélie, back toward his dystopian earlier work. He begins with a medley of five integral characters and the disparate ways they mutilate themselves to escape combat, in the darkest corners of the foxholes they imagine will be their tombs. It's a real attention-grabber, and it sets in motion a complex plot with numerous subordinate characters, featured in their own offshoot episodes from the main story. Perhaps not even its French-speaking audiences can fully follow A Very Long Engagement, with so many characters whose tenuous ties to each other must be constantly remembered, sans help from Jeunet. The task is further complicated for those who need to read subtitles in addition to gazing in rapture at the production design. Still, an ability to recount every plot detail is not essential to the enjoyment of A Very Long Engagement, which has so many optic pleasures that the need for clarity or continuity becomes de-emphasized. It's well worth that second viewing to appreciate all the subtleties. Notable among the performances are Audrey Tautou playing, well, Audrey Tautou, and Jodie Foster moonlighting in a French film with a finesse that's surprising, even if her unconventional choice of roles is not. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Five soldiers are convicted of self-mutilation in order to escape military service during World War I. They are condemned to face near certain death in the no man's land between the French and German trench lines. It appears that all of them were killed in a subsequent battle, but Mathilde, the fiancée of one of the soldiers, refuses to give up hope and begins to uncover clues as to what actually took place on the battlefield. She is all the while driven by the constant reminder of what her fiancé had carved into one of the bells of the church near their home, MMM for Manech Aime Mathilde (Manech Loves Mathilde; a pun on the French word aime, which is pronounced like the letter "M". In the English-language version, this is changed to "Manech Marries Mathilde").
Along the way, she discovers the brutally corrupt system used by the French government to deal with those who tried to escape the front. She also discovers the stories of the other men who were sentenced to the no man's land as a punishment. She, with the help of a private investigator, attempts to find out what happened to her fiancé. The story is told both from the point of view of the fiancée in Paris and the French countryside—mostly Brittany—of the 1920s, and in flashback to the battlefield. In fact, however, the couple are from Cap-Breton, in the Landes department of southwest France. This is made clear in the novel.
The film received generally positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 77% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 140 reviews.[1]Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 76 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.[2] The film had a production budget of $56.6 million USD and earned $70.1 million in theaters worldwide.[3]
