A Very Long Engagement Release Date: November 26, 2004 Starring: Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Jodie Foster, Dominique Pinon Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/22/04)
When he codirected in the ’90s with Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet specialized in explorations of the grotesque and fantastic; their dark, dazzling Delicatessen and TheCity of Lost Children are engrossing immersions in ickiness. Striking out on his own with 2001’s spectacular Amélie, he pioneered a kind of super-magic hyperrealism, deploying all manner of cinematic contrivance—differing styles of cinematography, special effects, unusual editing techniques, and more—and melded it with a distinctively Gallic, discursive storytelling style. It worked like a charm given Amélie’s story line, which was rather like a romantic fable wrought by Rube Goldberg. A Very Long Engagement (from a novel by the popular French author Sébastien Japrisot) concerns weightier themes—the horrors of war, the potential loss of one’s true soul mate. Audrey Tautou, the charmer who played the title role in Amélie, is somewhat less winsome here. Hanging on to a thread of hope that her childhood love was not in fact put to death after being condemned for wounding himself in an attempt to get out of the hellish trenches of WWI France, her character Mathilde is a portrayal of doggedness that’s perpetually in danger of tilting into catastrophic heartbreak. In her quest for her man, she encounters a group of characters that range from the delightfully eccentric to the quietly poignant to the out-and-out appalling. Jeunet manages to apply the crazy-quilt quality of Amélie with no dilution of the material’s power; indeed, he delivers something Hollywood used to be expert at but can’t quite cut any more—an epic treatment of epic themes that doesn’t soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.
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