***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Jean-Pierre Becker, Dominique Bettenfield, Julie Depardieu, Dominique Pinon, Chantel Neuwirth, and Tcheky Karyo
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & written by Jeunet and Guillame Laurant, from the novel by Sebastien Japrisot
2004
134 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2004
Here is a movie that is as angry as “Fahrenheit 9/11” yet has the fairy tale workings of “Sleeping Beauty.” It’s the grit and dirt of “Seven” told with the storybook vision of “Harry Potter.” It combines the cynicism and futility of “Catch 22” with the saint’s joy over small things, like dog farts. It’s as gauzy and brown as an old photo but as prescient as any movie set in the here-and-now. It’s firmly in the lineage of Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” and Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” yet it is clearly from the makers of the hyper-romantic “Amelie.” It’s as sad as a dirge but maintains Dr. Suess’s fascination with Rube Goldberg inventions. Here is a movie that combines the grotesque with grotesques. It’s “A Very Long Engagement,” the World War I epic from French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet, reuniting him with Audrey Tautou, the star of his enormously popular “Amelie.” If Europeans know something about war that we don’t, it comes from being invaded. Jeunet doesn’t bother keeping the fairy tale romanticism in check with the blood-soaked grime. Instead, he plays both aspects fearlessly to the hilt and, by some miracle, each strengthens the other. Against all odds and logic, this movie works.
The movie begins with a group of French soldiers who have chosen self-mutilation over spending another minute in the mania of the trenches. In the great contest of Stupidest War in All of History, World War I is definitely way up there. We meet the soldiers en route to their execution; if you’re wondering whether the movie thinks of them as cowards or not, consider that they have names like “Notre Dame” and “Angel” and one of them is a carpenter. They all have stigmata of sorts, one of them even rises from the dead, and one of them raises the children of another man, which puts him in good company, if you think St. Joseph is a good guy. The movie’s continual Christian imagery—of crosses and cathedrals, of nuns dying next to the soldiers they hope to heal, of priests quietly looking after the permanently shellshocked—is clear about how the filmmakers imagine the Prince of Peace sees things. Yet the soldiers are far from saints. In fact, “A Very Long Engagement” gains tremendous power from the ordinariness of these men. The maze of flashbacks shows them as having made mistakes, sinned, loved and lost, yet the movie glows with a love for life. They lived, they walked the earth, and though they may not have been remarkable or even close to perfect, they had hopes and dreams and dreads like everyone else, and they didn’t deserve what they got.
We follow the fiancé of one of the men in the years just after the war. Played by Audrey Tautou, she is a limping farm girl from Brittany who refuses to believe her man has died. She is determined to track him down, despite the piles of evidence mounting against her hopes. She hires a private eye, sneaks into military libraries, feigns greater handicaps than she really has, and in general drives mad her poor aunt and uncle (Chantel Neuwirth and Dominique Pinon). She plays little superstitious tricks with herself: “if the dog comes into the room before supper’s ready, then he’s alive,” “if I can run around the hill to the intersection before his car reaches it, he’ll come home safe,” “if this train enters a tunnel before I’m asked for a ticket, then I’ll find him.” Each time the trick fails her, but she only shrugs it off. Even after finding a grave with his name on it she keeps hoping.
If there are causes worth dying for, they don’t show up in “A Very Long Engagement,” which portrays war as sparked by safe, rich men, who casually decide what amount of death is “statistically insignificant.” The powerful make this movie sick to its stomach. The abuse of morality used to coax the little guy into the fray is equally decried in two instances, one quick and the other longer. So much is the movie concerned with the desperate preservation of life that Tautou’s farm girl would much rather discover that her beloved is living with a plump German girl than in the earth. The longer episode involves a soldier who cooks up a scheme to avoid a death in the mud by having his wife get pregnant with another man. Propriety and possessiveness are nothing in the face of the grave. We can’t say what they do is right, but we so easily forgive it. If the men were blameless, “A Very Long Engagement” might well have been too preachy to work. It’s a good thing they aren’t.
“A Very Long Engagement” is as amazing to look at as “Amelie,” perhaps even moreso. 1920s France is reconstructed flawlessly, from the pastoral countryside to the bustling streets of Paris to the palpably wet depths of the trenches. I could detect no demarcation between reality and special effects in the Paris shops set in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral. Jeunet continues to indulge his obsession with shooting meaty, fleshy faces up close with a wide-angle lens, yet his tone is affectionate instead of mocking.
Some audiences may be bothered by how the flashbacks run into each other and how we might forget which soldier is which in the longer-than-average runtime. Tautou’s investigation is equally hard to follow. We know the Corsican lover of one of the other soldiers is dogging her every step, although she has chosen to avenge her man’s death against those who ordered his execution. How, why, and where the two women’s paths converge is murky. But these details are beside the point. Tautou’s investigation is oftentimes just a clothesline for episodes both moving and morbid, for her meeting with broken widows and families slowly putting themselves back together. Instead of hearing the specific story of specific people, we come to feel that we are being immersed in the sorrows and joys of an entire continent. There’s something so simple and moving about her visit to a former no-man’s-land with one of the soldiers. Instead of the mucky craters where thousands upon thousands of men had life ripped away from them, there are flowers from one horizon to the other. And the soldier mutters “I don’t recognize any of this.”
Finished Saturday, January 29th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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