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 features 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. Someher dead parents lawyer, her aunt and uncleassist her with tolerant sighs and looks of consternation. Othersthe detective which she hires to find her fiancé, various soldiers who blabber on about their own adventuresfulfill 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 husbands 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. Tinas dark features disappear in the shadows.
This scene is an emblem of the movies constant juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, a signature of director Jean Jenets. His previous success, le fabuleux destin damélie poulain mockingly skimmed over the death of the protagonists 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 humorthe stylish postman destroying the carefully raked gravel composition in front of Mathildes house, mathilde playing the horn because it is the only instrument that can imitate a distressed cryare juxtaposed often directly to scenes of destructionbodies 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 lovers 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
