A Very Long Engagement

Directors this week are very much into their work. Taylor Hackford makes a film about Ray Charles over 152 mins that was 15 years in the making. Theo Angelopoulos makes The Weeping Meadow over 162 mins and has two more films to come in the Trilogy, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet here creates a story over 134 mins that took 10 years to bring to the screen!

A Very Long Engagement is taken from the Sebastien Japrisot novel released in 1991 about a young girl Mathilde waiting and hoping that her young beau will return from the First World War. In the novel heroine Mathilde is in a wheelchair but Jeunet felt it would be too restrictive having a heroine in a wheelchair so instead he makes her a Polio sufferer who walks with an impediment and the wheelchair only gets a tiny amount of use in the film when Mathilde is tired.

The film though flips constantly between the two worlds, showing graphic scenes of trench warfare (as brutal and realistic as those realised in Saving Private Ryan) and introducing a set of deserters who are thrown over the frontline into no man’s land, that includes Mathilde’s fiancé Manech (Gaspard). We get to meet the families back home of all the deserters sent over, largely through Jeunet’s jerky quickfire editing technique.

Many will see traces of Amelie in Mathilde (as a character she has the same fiery spirit), but largely this film is a wide-focus romantic epic, and a fine piece of storytelling that unravels its secrets as we head towards a climax, wondering if Mathilde’s man has made it out alive. Its overlong – you will find that Jeunet overdoes one or two jokes for example which are funny the first time, but irritating by the fifth. It has a few minor saving graces such as a lovely cameo from Jodie Foster who seems almost unrecognisable merely because she’s speaking French likes its her mother tongue.

It is a very long engagement and one where you just wish the camera would stop jumping so dizzily sometimes from scene to scene, but in places, this is still bravura filmmaking, innovative and memorable. It also has a basic charm that is all its own, and the war scenes for the boys, are positively first-rate.

Matt Arnoldi