Friday, February 18, 2005

A very long engagement (just like it sounds)

As its title hints, a Very Long Engagement is a lengthy film, thankfully provided with enough good French humor and beautiful scenery to prevent it from becoming a pain.  The movie opens on the French battlefront in 1917.  Five soldiers are forced through the trench slush.  A husky voice over informs us that these five individuals will be executed shortly for their attempt to desert the army.  Follows a series of flashbacks of intimate moments in each of their lives.  The fifth soldier, Manech (Gaspard ulliel) remembers the morning after he made love with his fiancé, Mathilde (audrey tautou), his hand resting on her breast; his smiling face, on her shoulder.  3 years later Mathilde is tired of limping (she has a disease which has maimed her leg) around the picturesque seaside in Brittany waiting for her lover.  She decides to search for him. 

During the rest of the feature’s two hours, mathilde alternatively rides trains, cars and hobbles across France to track down the people that have last seen her lover.  Her travels acquaint the innocent girl with a swarm of benign french people.  Some—her dead parents’ lawyer, her aunt and uncle—assist her with tolerant sighs and looks of consternation.  Others—the detective which she hires to find her fiancé, various soldiers who blabber on about their own adventures—fulfill her requests with comic enthusiasm.

Sunny flashbacks of Mathilde and Manech together along with subplot death and sex scenes are thrown in among the hours of interviews and letter reading of the quest.  One of the subplots follows a foil of Mathilde.  Tina Lombardi (Mathilde Cotillard), a beautiful fury, murders all those that caused her husband’s death (he was part of the five executed).

In one scene, Tina Lombardi in a black corset cajoles the fat officer that condemned her husband.  In the luxurious room, she playfully ties his pudgy hands to the bedposts and bandages his mouth.  She then takes out a gun and points it up at the mirrored ceiling.  The pieces of glass pierce the huge stomach of the officer as opera music blasts in the background. Tina’s dark features disappear in the shadows.

This scene is an emblem of the movie’s constant juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, a signature of director Jean Jenet’s.  His previous success, “le fabuleux destin d’amélie poulain” mockingly skimmed over the death of the protagonist’s mother and the decrepitude of her unhappy friends.  This feature successfully doses its darkness in order to heighten its delightful comic effect.  In A very long engagement Jean Jenet also packs a large amount of humor, but the darkness of the movie is too potent to be simply dismissed with laughter.  It is one thing to laugh at a single death, it is another to laugh at millions of war victims.

A very long engagement is pulled between mockery and its honest attempt to depict the horrors of the first world war.  Scenes of humor—the stylish postman destroying the carefully raked gravel composition in front of Mathilde’s house, mathilde playing the horn because it is the only instrument that can imitate a distressed cry—are juxtaposed often directly to scenes of destruction—bodies explode, faces are spliced to pieces.  This constant oscillation between the comic and the tragic prevents the movie from fully achieving its desired effects.  Comedy destroys the tragic effect and vice versa.

There is nothing reproachable in the individual scenes however.  Both comedy and tragedy are extremely well carried out.  In particular it is amazing to see Audrey Tautou switch so fast from drama to humor.  Confronted time and time again with her lover’s decease, her big dark eyes framed by princess-lea curls cloud over with unbearable pain.  In the lighter scenes, she is delightfully innocent, her tomboyish stubbornness and her pursed lips give her the look of an amazed child.  She is at her best though when she unfolds her radiant smile in one of those intimate love scenes which Jean Jennet crafts to perfection.

Rife with instances of exquisite performance and beautiful scenery, a very long engagement is definitely worth the time especially if you are willing to let emotions sway you

 

 

Posted by Aventurina King at 02:11:27 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

what’s up with the gates?

It is a question I cannot answer.
And it comes with many others.  What is the purpose of the installation?  Is it purely aesthetic?  Or can one graft an interpretation on it?  What are we as viewers supposed to experience by walking through them?
According to an interview with Christo and Jean-Claude,  they “ want to create works of art of joy and beauty”.  And that’s it.  For my part, I can’t see this beauty.  The gates seem fragile in their separation one from another, clumsy in their thousand-fold repetition which gives them the appearance of an orange herd in central park.  Had they all been linked by a long piece of orange fabric, maybe the effect would have been different. 
But I am probably just yearning for something akin to their previous works.  There was something so powerful about the idea of wrapping up monuments, transforming these huge relics of history and authority into gifts.  Something to make us realize that these monuments belong to the people, belong to the culture.  They are gifts.
Mayor Bloomberg managed to pull off a reading of the gates that would place it in the pool of the couple’s other works: “Innovative works of art provoke debate, spark our imaginations and help us redefine the space we live in, and ‘The Gates’ will bring that experience to those who come to see it.”  In one sense, the gates did redefine central park for me, it made me yearn to see the park without the gates.  But maybe this is due to the barriers along the gates which prevent people from straying out of the stripped path.  I trust that imprisonment isn’t the sensation of joy and beauty Christo and Jean-Claude wanted to create.
Posted by Aventurina King at 02:05:57 | Permalink | Comments (1) »